Last month, the CEOs of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon were hauled before the U.S. Congress to be interrogated about their companies’ monopolistic behavior. While Democrats relentlessly grilled the four CEOs over their breach of antitrust laws, Republicans were just as interested in questioning their national loyalty and asking whether they had ties with the Chinese military. At the hearing, Republican Rep. Ken Buck accused Google of declining to work with the U.S. Defense Department while falsely claiming that the company collaborated with the Chinese military. In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai fought nationalism with patriotism, stating that Google was in fact “proud to support the U.S. government” and boasted that they had “recently signed a big project with the Department of Defense.”
Coming from Pichai, the immigrant CEO of a company known for its progressive values, boasting of Google’s collaboration with the Pentagon may just seem like a defensive response to being called treasonous. But Google’s commitment to the military had long preceded this moment. The company’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, has long advocated for deepening ties with the Pentagon and now serves as the chairman of the Defense Innovation Board—an initiative to transfer technological innovation from Silicon Valley to the U.S. military. Last month, a federal advisory commission that Schmidt chairs also recommended the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) school to directly staff the U.S. government, including the Defense Department, with new technologists.
Google is far from alone. Late last year, Microsoft won a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon with the goal of “increasing [the military’s] lethality.” Amazon, which also fought aggressively for the $10 billion contract, continues to provide cloud infrastructure for the CIA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Underpinning this new affinity for the U.S. government is a widespread anxiety that the rise of China’s tech industry may spell the end of Silicon Valley’s dominance. In the past year, the tech investor Peter Thiel and Schmidt himself both wrote New York Times op-eds with the same warning: Silicon Valley must start working with the Pentagon, or else China will win.
