Recently, Google has been facing accusations of aiding China and its military, especially when General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed during a Senate hearing earlier in March that Google’s AI operations in China “indirectly benefits the Chinese military,” following which US President Trump also went on to condemn Google of “helping China and their military, but not the US.”
A Google spokesperson denied such claims:
We are not working with the Chinese military. We are working with the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare
Addressing such statements, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has planned to meet a top US military official in Washington, DC, this Wednesday in order to scrutinize Google’s business and technology endeavors in China.
This is not about me and Google. This is about us looking at the second and third-order of effects of our business ventures in China, Chinese form of government, and the impact it’s going to have on the United States’ ability to maintain a competitive military advantage – General Joseph Dunford, chairman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Google established an AI laboratory in Beijing in 2017 whose AI endeavors focus on “education, research on natural language understanding and market algorithms, and development of globally available tools.” The AI lab website now states, “We’re developing a world-class research effort dedicated to creating artificial intelligence solutions to real-world problems.”
But it is proving to turn into a clash between Google’s global ambitions and the U.S. military’s apprehension of China’s technical power, which might adversely affect Google’s cloud-computing business.
