Turner on Google's Pentagon deal and abandoned protections

In January, federal agents shot and killed several innocent people in Minneapolis.

I learned that Google sells cloud services to the agencies involved, and I set out to change that.

That campaign soon turned into an attempt to stop Google from signing a Pentagon deal with no restrictions against killer robots or mass spying.

In the end, Google signed without the protections that it had once promised for its deployments.

Before I left, I tried everything I could from the inside.

I organized a petition to Google's chief sign.

signed by about 250 colleagues.

I got him to sign a legal brief supporting Anthropic, the company the Pentagon punished for refusing all lawful use terms.

I wrote dozens of pages of contract language and oversight mechanisms favorably reviewed by experts in military and surveillance law and sent it to the chief scientist.

And to Google DeepMind CEO.

The chief scientist didn't want to spend his time supporting that kind of structure.

The CEO at the time, Demis Sassavis, routed it to senior policy staff, Alan Defoe and Owen Larder, who never finished evaluating it.

Google signed while they waited.

Demis routed my proposal.

Two members of the team did review it, though I didn't really receive much follow-up after that.

I offered to fly out from San Francisco to London to answer questions in person.

But I was never really able to get traction, a yes or a no, on alternative governance mechanisms that Google might adopt.