Eric Schmidt is purposely being kept in the dark about Google's push to win a $10 billion cloud deal away from Amazon
REUTERS/Beck DiefenbachEric Schmidt
- Former Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt might have proved useful in Google's bid to win a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract.
- But while Schmidt still serves as technical advisor to Google's parent company Alphabet, he's not allowed to intervene in Google's deals with the defense sector.
- During testimony before Congress on Tuesday, Schmidt sounded decidedly more hawkish than the Google employees who recently signed a petition asking the company never to work on weapons technology.
Eric Schmidt, once the bespectacled face of Google, is now purposely being kept in the dark about Google's relationship with the military.
Schmidt, who joined Google as its CEO in 2001, became its executive chairman in 2011. He worked with the company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to grow Google into the publicly traded superpower it is today. In December, Schmidt stepped down as executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, though he remains on the Alphabet board and serves as a technical director.
However, on Tuesday, Schmidt told reporters that until hearing about it in the media, he had no idea Google was working with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology, according to DefenseOne.com, a blog that writes about the defense industry. Schmidt made the comments following testimony he gave before the House Armed Services Committee.
When news reports first revealed Google was supplying AI tech to the military, more than 3,000 employees, outraged over the possibility that Google could help the US government wage war, signed a petition calling for an end to the relationship with the Pentagon. They also asked that the management publicly pledge that it would never work on weapons technology.
But fear that Schmidt also would be offended by working with the military isn't the reason that Google kept him out the loop.
In 2016, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter appointed Schmidt as chairman of the Department of Defense's Innovation Advisory Board, created to help the military adopt new technologies. Because of Schmidt's relationship to both the DOD and Google, both entities want to avoid creating any conflicts of interest, Schmidt said, according to DefenseOne.com.
Schmidt's recusal could affect Google's bottom line. According to reports, Google is among the companies, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, that are chasing a $10 billion Pentagon contract to supply cloud computing services. Amazon Web Services, considered the favorite to win the contract, is already working for federal customers including the Central Intelligence Agency.
What all this means for Google is that the executive with seemingly the best military connections - an executive who also happens to be a very able salesman - can't help the company pitch its services to the DOD.
And what does Schmidt think of Google and the rest of Silicon Valley working with the Pentagon? He sounds a tad more hawkish than some at Google.
During his testimony before Congress, Schmidt said: "The nature of AI is a long-term technology that will be useful for defensive and perhaps offensive purposes as well," Schmidt said, according to Bloomberg. He added that to "make it easier" for the Pentagon to work with private industry would be welcome.