Thomas K. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Ohio–
Google has become the latest tech giant to establish itself firmly within the military-industrial complex with a $200 million contract with the Pentagon. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly tied to modern warfare, workers inside the tech industry are beginning to resist their employers’ expanding role in the U.S. military. More than 600 employees at the Google Deepmind AI research lab signed a letter addressed to the CEO in an attempt to block the deal, and now have voted to unionize, seeking representation from the Communication Workers Union.
On Apr. 28, Alphabet Inc. (the parent holding company of Google) signed a $200 million deal with the Pentagon, allowing the Pentagon access to Google’s artificial intelligence models for classified work. The signing of this deal puts Google in the same group as OpenAI and xAI, who also offer AI models for classified purposes. Specifically, the contracts give the pentagon use of the AI models “for any lawful purpose,” yet the deal reportedly does not give Google “any right to control or veto lawful government decision making.”
The working class will recognize the language in this format: “We can use the models and employees for whatever we want, and you can’t hold the board of directors accountable!” Along with this contract Google is also pursuing $6 billion in other AI and Cloud service contracts with the Pentagon. All of this comes after Google reversed its ban on AI for weapons and surveillance, laying out a clear, intended path of alignment with the defense industry.
In response to the $200 million deal, workers at the Google DeepMind lab research facility in London signed a letter to the CEO calling for a cancellation of this partnership and a demand to not use their work for classified projects. Google signed anyway. To apply further pressure to the company, workers in the same facility voted to unionize. The initial push to unionize came after the company walked back its provisions against weapons and surveillance. In a letter sent to the manager of the facility, the workers have asked that CWU and Unite the Union join them as joint representatives of the DeepMind employees.
Among demands of greater transparency over how their labor will be used, workers also demanded that the company end its long-standing contract with the Israeli military. It’s important to remember that in 2018, Google workers were successfully able to stop the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which “uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.” These aren’t empty words and deeds.
The largest search engine in the world just gave the U.S. government access to its AI models for classified business. However, Google employees are demonstrating through action that at all times the workers can and should be fighting against their corporate oppressors. Capitalists will always seek to take the labor power of others and sell it for the best price. The laborers of the world must organize and demand control over our work! The most effective tool at starting this process is unionization, collective organization in direct struggle against the bosses and capitalists. With enough workers under a unified banner, the workers can come together and strike, protest, and bind the wheels of production.
Workers outside of the tech industry aren’t permitted to sit idle either: as data centers continue to sprout, and as regulations are changed to accommodate these parasitic facilities, all workers involved in the construction, maintenance, and operations of these buildings must unite with their coworkers and give support to members of the working class across all trades and industries. “Human Lives are being lost and civil liberties put at risk at home and abroad from misuses of the technology we’re playing a key role in building.” Google workers made this statement in their letter, but it holds true for all workers who participate in this struggle in solidarity.
As the war machine keeps turning, and as the nightmare of a surveillance state becomes a reality, workers all across the world must organize in defense of ourselves and of our communities. Corporations realize record profits each year by selling our labor for use in the most desperate and depraved scenarios. Without us, they have nothing. Without our talents, our creativity, our physical life force, their “vision” would amount to nothing but a hill of beans! We must organize and educate ourselves politically; we must unionize our workplaces! Those who are already inside unions, who are frustrated by the labor-aristocratic union representatives refusing to organize beyond the workplace in greater political struggles, must agitate inside their unions and reclaim them for the workers!
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