Google signs Pentagon AI deal with weaker guardrails than OpenAI, faces internal backlash from 1,000 employees

Google signed a Pentagon contract allowing its Gemini AI models to be used inside the U.S. military's classified networks for “any lawful purpose,” following similar deals from OpenAI and xAI but with what legal experts say is weaker language than OpenAI's contract. Roughly 1,000 Google employees have signed an open letter opposing the deal, with critics noting that Google's contract obliges the company to remove technical safeguards if they prevent the government from doing something it wants to do, and lacks OpenAI's contractual guarantee against mass domestic surveillance. Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow on LawAI's U.S. Law and Policy team, told Fortune that “even that contractual guarantee is not present in Google's deal,” and a Google DeepMind researcher who spoke anonymously said the company's lack of transparency about the contract felt as if the deal had been done “in the dark.”