WP: Google Has Been Providing ‘Israel’s’ Military with Advanced AI
By Staff, Agencies
Google has been directly assisting “Israel's” War Ministry, an exclusive Washington Post [WP] report revealed on Wednesday.
Since the first few weeks of the “Israel”-Hamas war, the employees at Google have worked to provide “Israel's” military with access to its most advanced artificial intelligence, the report unveils.
According to the report, this has happened contrary to Google's public efforts to separate itself from “Israel's” military and security bodies, following protests by its own employees over a cloud computing contract with the “Israeli” entity.
WP, citing documents it obtained, claimed that a Google employee in the cloud division expedited requests from “Israel's” War Ministry for increased access to Google AI.
The report further mentioned that “Israel” wished to quickly increase its use of Google's Vertex service, a machine learning platform that allows users to train and deploy ML models and AI.
The incentive for expediting the request reportedly stemmed from fears that not providing urgent access to Vertex would push the “Israeli” forces toward Google's cloud rival, Amazon.
Amazon also works with “Israel” under the same Nimbus contract, a $4 billion endeavor to provide cloud services from an “Israeli” region. This ensures sovereignty and privacy of information in accordance with “Israeli” law.
In 2024, Google fired 50 employees who had been protesting against the 'Nimbus' contract, believing the technology would be used by military forces to harm Palestinians. In 2021, Google and Amazon workers penned an open letter to The Guardian calling for the condemnation of “Project Nimbus."
Several other documents from 2023 and 2024 revealed how Google employees requested additional AI access for the “Israeli” forces.
In November 2024, a Google employee pushed for the “Israeli” forces to have access to Gemini AI technology, which allows users to develop an AI assistant to process documents and audio.
The documents obtained by the WP did not show how “Israel” planned to use Google AI, however, Google has previously said that the provision of its Nimbus cloud services to “Israel” is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Nevertheless, Gaby Portnoy, director of “Israel's” National Cyber Directorate, indicated at a 2024 conference that the Nimbus contract was directly involved in combat applications.
“Thanks to the Nimbus public cloud, phenomenal things are happening during the fighting, these things play a significant part in the victory — I will not elaborate,” he said, according to People and Computers, an “Israeli” outlet.
Neither the IWF nor Google replied to the WP's request for comment.
“Israel” has been integrating AI into the military for several years, using the technology to process surveillance footage.
A previous December 2024 investigation by the WP found that the “Israeli” forces use an AI tool called Habsora to provide commanders with thousands of targets to strike, both human and infrastructure.
According to the WP, Habsora analyzes data, such as intercepted communications and satellite imagery, to generate coordinates for potential targets.
The revelation led to fears that the AI was being used to endanger lives; however, the “Israeli” forces disputed this in a statement in the paper at the time.
As per “Israeli” forces, “The more ability you have to compile pieces of information effectively, the more accurate the process is,” and added “If anything, these tools have minimized collateral damage and raised the accuracy of the human-led process.”
