Google drops out of $100M Pentagon drone swarm contest after advancing, citing “resourcing” amid ethics review

Google withdrew from a $100M Pentagon prize challenge to create technology for voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarms on Feb. 11 after its proposal had been among the successful submissions, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke to Bloomberg. The company officially cited a lack of “resourcing,” but the decision followed an internal ethics review per records reviewed by Bloomberg, and came as hundreds of Google AI researchers sent a letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai urging him to refuse to make the company's AI systems available for classified U.S. defense workloads. OpenAI, Palantir, and xAI are among the companies selected to compete in the six-month contest, while Anthropic applied but was not selected.