Google facilitated AI tools for Israeli military during war on Gaza, says report
Google Cloud’s logo is pictured at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on 27 February 2024
Middle East Eye reports on 22 January 2025:
Google provided the Israeli military with access to its latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology from the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
Shortly after the beginning of the war in October 2023, a Google employee in its cloud division escalated requests for Israel’s defence ministry to have increased access to the company’s AI tools, according to documents obtained by the Post.
The defence ministry urgently wanted to expand usage of Google’s Vertex, which apply AI algorithm’s to a client’s own data. An employee at Google warned that if the company did not give Israel’s military more access, it would risk losing out to cloud rival Amazon.
Under the $1.2bn “Project Nimbus” partnership, both Google and Amazon already provide cloud computing and AI services to Israel’s government and army.
A document from November 2023 showed a Google employee thanking a co-worker for handling the Israeli defence ministry request, and documents from the spring and summer of 2024 show employees requesting additional access to AI technology for Israel’s military.
There were documents as recent as November 2024, indicating Israeli military use of Google’s AI tools as well as a request by the military for use of Google’s Gemini AI technology. The documents don’t explicitly show how Israel’s defence ministry used the AI tools, the report noted.
The Post has previously reported that after the outbreak of war in Gaza, the Israeli military turned to an internal AI tool called Habsora, which was used to provide Israeli commanders with thousands of Palestinian targets in the besieged enclave