Chandravongsri’s parents were born in Laos, where he still has an extended family. He has witnessed firsthand how CIA-led bombing raids in the 1960s and 1970s left a deadly legacy of unexploded ordnance that still threatens lives today, a problem common to many war zones, including Gaza. He says that reading the AI capabilities in Project Nimbus “really scared me”.
Chandravongsri is far from the only employee in Google’s vast, international workforce whose background offers a different perspective on the Pentagon and its military allies than that of many American employees and executives. “There are a lot of places where Google employees come from that have been on the wrong side of US policy,” Chandravongsri said. “There are also many Palestinian workers. They are afraid to speak out a lot.”
After Google pulled out of Maven, it continued its relationship with the Pentagon, albeit largely through lesser-known projects such as anti-corrosion technology for naval vessels and cloud security for the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. The 2021 announcement of Project Nimbus and Google’s bid for the Pentagon’s $9 billion flagship cloud project, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, has left some employees concerned that the company will significantly expand its military work.
Alphabet Workers Union, which has more than 1,000 members in Google’s parent company but has no collective bargaining rights, went public in January 2021 and has had a working group dedicated to investigating military work at Google since its inception. Chandravongsri is a member of the group, which has pressured management over the JWCC and Project Nimbus.
Last November, a question about the JWCC’s compatibility with Google’s AI principles got enough votes for an internal Q&A tool called Dory to be read at a company-wide meeting for all involved. According to a report from CNBC, Google Cloud head Thomas Kurian replied that the company’s technology can be used for parts of the contract that do not violate AI principles. He later published a blog post detailing some of these potential uses. Chandravongsri was not satisfied with the response, saying Kurian’s claims contradicted the military language of the US government’s bid, which talked about the need to crack down on China.
Employees were less fortunate to get their questions about Project Nimbus in company-wide meetings or the Weather Report, the Cloud team’s all-hands, urging employees to make their concerns public. Ariel Koren, a Jewish marketing executive and outspoken opponent of Project Nimbus, resigned last week, saying she was under pressure from executives, a claim Google has denied. Koren also says she has encountered resistance from other Jewish workers who support Israel.
Google and Amazon employees concerned about Project Nimbus were contacted through activist group Jewish Voice for Peace. In June 2021, employees of the two companies formed a joint committee and in October they published a letter in The Guardian against the contract.
The partnership opened up new ground for Amazon employees, who spoke out less publicly against their company’s military contracts, which are more extensive than Google’s. Amazon’s culture is generally seen as less open to dissent than Google’s, which from the outset encouraged employees to speak freely with their leaders in company forums.
