According to a report by Gizmodo, Google has decided not to renew its controversial contract for Project Maven with the Department of Defense.

Google had an employee meeting to discuss whether AI should be used in the military, The New York Times reported on May 30. As Wired recently pointed out, Project Maven is poised to expand-with or without Google. More than 4,000 employees signed a letter asking to cancel the contract and demanded that Google and its AI technology should not be in the business of war. Google's contract accounted for only a small part of Project Maven's technical ambitions, and other companies work on similar image-recognition software that could potentially be deployed as an alternative.

Internal emails obtained by Gizmodo showed that Google's plans for the project may not have been as low-key as the company wanted people to think.

Google will release guidelines on the ethical use of AI next week, according to the Gizmodo report.

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The project with the Pentagon, called Project Maven, aimed to implement the AI technology to pinpoint and determine what particular objects are in drone footage, thereby increasing the accuracy of the drone strikes, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported on March 6. About a dozen employees resigned in protest.

"The technology is used to flag images for human review and is meant to save lives and save people from having to do highly tedious work", the company said back in April.

The project got off the ground in April 2017, but it didn't make waves until a year later when more than 3,100 Google employees signed a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai opposing the partnership on ethical grounds.

Further complicating matters are comments that Google has made about the program. Another internal email from Aileen Black and published by the Intercept, however, shows the project was expected to grow rapidly, and "as the program grows expect spend is budgeted at 250 M per year".

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The decision comes amid strong opposition within the technology giant's workforce to the Pentagon project known as Maven.

The Maven contract was of little value to Google right now, but executives reportedly viewed Maven as a gateway to more lucrative military and intelligence contracts.

Project Maven includes several subcontractors. The dispute has caused grief for some senior Google officials, including Dr. Li, as they try to straddle the gap between scientists with deep moral objections and salespeople salivating over defense contracts.

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