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Documented facts (9)
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's planned White House ballroom. According to CNBC, Alphabet is contributing $22 million, about 7% of the project's estimated cost, under the settlement reached with Trump the previous month over his lawsuit against YouTube for banning him from the platform after the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol; the settlement says the money will be contributed on Trump's behalf to the Trust for the National Mall.
Removed Red Dot and similar apps used to report sightings of ICE officials from the Play Store, 404 Media reported, after Apple removed ICEBlock following direct pressure from Justice Department officials.
Response: Google said the apps shared the location of what it described as a vulnerable group that had recently faced a violent act connected to such apps, which 404 Media described as a veiled reference to ICE officials.
The report "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide" (A/HRC/59/23) by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which describes Israel's campaign in Gaza as genocide, names Alphabet (Google) among the companies giving Israel near government-wide access to cloud and AI technologies. It states that Israel awarded Alphabet and Amazon the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract in 2021, largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure, and that the Project Nimbus consortium supplied critical cloud and AI infrastructure when the Israeli military's internal cloud overloaded in October 2023.
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.”
Response: Google has said of Project Nimbus: "Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services." Israel called the report politically motivated and legally baseless.
Removed from its AI Principles the earlier commitment not to pursue weapons or "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms".
Response: In a blog post co-written by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Google cited a global competition for AI leadership and said democracies should lead AI development and work together on AI that "supports national security".
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, a donation confirmed by a company spokesperson.
Training documents obtained by The Intercept showed that Google was offering the Israeli government, through the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus cloud contract shared with Amazon, AI capabilities including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking and sentiment analysis.
Response: Google did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment. The documents appeared to be standard training materials distributed to Google Cloud customers.
Removed the tactical voting app of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny's allies from the Google Play Store in Russia as parliamentary elections began, after Russia demanded the removal and said a refusal would be treated as meddling in the election.
Response: Google issued no formal statement. A person familiar with the decision told CNN that Google blocked the app because of legal demands from Russia's internet regulator and after Russian authorities threatened its local staff with criminal prosecution.
US Customs and Border Protection accepted in August 2020 a proposal to use Google Cloud to support the AI work of its innovation team, which was developing a "virtual" border wall of surveillance towers and drones with Anduril, according to contract documents reported by The Intercept.
Response: Google declined to comment on the contract.
The Intercept revealed, from leaked documents, that Google was developing "Dragonfly", a censored search engine for China that would blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protest. Work on the project was reported to have effectively ended in December 2018 after internal opposition.
Response: CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress in December 2018 that "right now" there were no plans to launch the search engine.