Facing employee unrest, Google executives defended its new bid for a multibillion-dollar Pentagon contract

• Google's top brass defended a bid for a multibillion-dollar US defense contract in an all-hands.
• Almost 1,000 employees upvoted a question on the matter, CNBC reported.

Google's top brass addressed the company's pursuit of a multibillion-dollar Department of Defense contract at an all-hands meeting last week, after employees raised the issue internally.

CNBC, which obtained audio of the meeting, reported that Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, and Thomas Kurian, his counterpart at the company's Cloud division, defended the firm's interests in the US government's Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program and attempted to draw a line between it and past work with the Pentagon, the latter of which caused outcry among staff.

CNBC reported that Kurian also tried to differentiate the JWCC from its predecessor the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure scheme, a $10 billion project that Google originally pitched for before pulling out of the process. JEDI was ultimately canceled by the Pentagon after Amazon said President Trump had unfairly awarded the contract to Microsoft.

Pichai read a question to Kurian from an anonymous employee that asked why Google was pursuing the JWCC when it had pulled out of its JEDI bid on AI-ethics grounds, CNBC reported.

Kurian, who took the top job at Google Cloud in 2018, responded by saying his division would be "proud to work with the DoD to help modernize their operations," the report said.

"There will be many areas where our product capabilities and our engineering expertise can be brought to bear with no conflict to Google's AI principles," Kurian said, CNBC reported.

He added that Googlers may not agree with the decision, but that Google's leadership felt it should work with the government where there was no conflict with the firm's principles.

Insider's Hugh Langley reported earlier in November that Google's pursuit of the new contract was riling employees, who have been venting with memes and messages on internal forums.

The Alphabet Workers Union has also been tweeting about the issue. It wrote in response to the CNBC story on Monday night, "Google, we will not modernize warfare."

Google did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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