Google Should Not Be in the Business of War

"Google Should Not Be in the Business of War" is the framing of the spring-2018 open letter from more than 3,100 Google employees addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai, opening with the line "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war" and demanding that Google cancel its participation in Project Maven — the US Department of Defense's Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team — and "draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology". The letter is the founding public artefact of the contemporary tech-worker-conscience organising lineage this corpus tracks: its anonymous-internal-letter form, its multi-team cross-functional organising shape, and its "no [tech] for [state-violence system]" rhetorical posture were the documented template the #NoTechForICE campaign drew on six months later (October 2018), and the No Tech For Apartheid campaign drew on three years later (October 2021). It also produced, inside three months, the most consequential single corporate-policy outcome the tech-worker conscience movement has yet documented: Google's 1 June 2018 announcement that it would not renew the Maven contract, and its 7 June 2018 publication of "AI at Google: our principles" naming weapons and norms-violating surveillance among the four "applications we will not pursue".

Origin

The letter was first reported by the New York Times on 4 April 2018 — by then it had been circulating internally on Google's communications servers for several weeks and had collected 3,100 signatures. Its proximate trigger was the late-2017 internal disclosure that Google had signed a US Department of Defense contract — publicly framed as worth around $9 million — to supply machine-learning systems for Project Maven, the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team that then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work had stood up on 26 April 2017 to apply machine vision and deep learning to drone-camera footage from US military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms.

The letter was organised by then-Google AI researcher Meredith Whittaker — a co-founder of the AI Now Institute earlier that year — and an autonomous cross-team Google employee group that Collective Action in Tech's retrospective records as spanning Cloud, AI, Communications, the Google Brain team, and DeepMind by January 2018. The text was anonymous — no signatory names were public — and its two-part operational demand was the load-bearing structure on which the rest of the campaign hung: first, that Google cancel the Maven contract; second, that the company commit to a clear, publicly enforced policy that "neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology". The first part of the demand was concrete and time-bounded, anchored on a specific contract the company could withdraw from; the second part lifted the framing from a single-contract objection to a structural one about what Google as an institution would and would not build, and it is the second part of the demand that supplies the framing's afterlife.

The supply-chain framing

The letter's substantive ground was the same supply-chain frame that the later #NoTechForICE and No Tech For Apartheid letters would inherit. Maven's military product — the automated identification of objects in drone-camera footage for US intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations — was not itself a weapons system; it was an information-system component that fed into the targeting and operational tempo of weapons systems. The letter's argument was that distinction-making at that level was unsafe: that the supply of machine-vision infrastructure to a state-violence platform constituted "build[ing] warfare technology" regardless of whether the contracting tech company built the kinetic end-product. That argument located the corporate-complicity objection at the scale of the contract and the supply relationship, not at the scale of any individual targeting decision or operational mission — the same scale-of-objection move the No Tech For Apartheid campaign would later make about Project Nimbus's cloud and AI services, and the #NoTechForICE campaign about ICE's Investigative Case Management infrastructure.

Travel into the tech-worker dissent movement

The framing's first external propagation was the Tech Workers Coalition's Coworker.org petition "Tech should not be in the business of war" — published on 19 April 2018, fifteen days after the NYT's first report — which translated the Google-internal demand into a cross-company tech-industry one addressed to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, with the opening "We are tech industry employees concerned about the lack of accountability, accuracy, and safety in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in offensive capabilities of the U.S. Military". The Coworker petition collected 332 signatures across the four companies before being marked "successful" on 1 June 2018, the day Google announced non-renewal. The petition was the framing's first hop out of the originating company and into the cross-company tech-industry worker base that the Tech Workers Coalition was assembling at the time.

The academic-side amplification came one month later. On 15 May 2018 the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) — a 2009-founded coalition of researchers, scientists, and ethicists working on autonomous-weapons accountability — published an open letter "in support of Google employees and tech workers" co-authored by Lucy Suchman of Lancaster University and signed by hundreds of academics in AI, ethics, and computer science. The ICRAC letter took the Google workers' two-part demand and extended it into a three-part academic-side companion: terminate the Maven contract, commit not to develop military technologies or allow personal data collected by Google to be used for military operations, and pledge to neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of autonomous weapons. The pairing — the worker-letter and the academic-letter running on different fronts of the same demand — is the template the Stop Killer Robots autonomous-weapons advocacy movement and the broader humanitarian-disarmament coalition had already developed for the LAWS file, and that the tech-worker conscience framing imported into the corporate-supply register.

Inside Google itself, The Intercept's 1 June 2018 reporting records "nearly a dozen" employees who resigned in protest before the non-renewal announcement; Collective Action in Tech's retrospective notes the eventual internal signatory count grew toward 5,000 across the campaign's full arc, the company's senior leadership made repeated "ethics is complicated, ethics is hard" responses in internal forums, and the cross-team organising shape included petition-gathering, all-hands question coordination, internal media tracking, meme distribution, and personal-statement collection — a self-organised employee campaign apparatus rather than a single-letter signing exercise.

Corporate-policy outcome

The outcome ran on two tracks in the first week of June 2018. On 1 June 2018, Google Cloud chief Diane Greene announced at a Friday-morning briefing that Google would not renew the Maven contract when it expired in March 2019 — the most consequential single piece of tech-worker-driven corporate-policy revision the contemporary movement has yet produced on the public record. Six days later, on 7 June 2018, Sundar Pichai published "AI at Google: our principles" — a corporate-policy document setting out seven affirmative principles (be socially beneficial; avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias; be built and tested for safety; be accountable to people; incorporate privacy design principles; uphold high standards of scientific excellence; be made available for uses that accord with these principles) and four "applications we will not pursue" categories, two of which directly mirrored the worker letter's structural objection: "weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people" and "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms".

The Maven contract itself did not end with Google's withdrawal. Per the Project Maven public record, the contract was transferred to Palantir Technologies, which became the project's principal subsequent contractor — an outcome the campaign's organisers have read both as a concrete win (Google's specific corporate-policy revision and its withdrawal from a contract it had signed) and as a limit on the supply-chain framing's reach (the underlying state-violence platform did not lose its commercial supplier; the supply relationship moved to a different contractor whose worker base had no comparable internal organising capacity at the time). The framing's own analytic premise — that the corporate-supply objection holds at the level of the contract and the supply relationship rather than the level of any single company — anticipates that limit: the move from Google to Palantir is the move the framing predicts and the move the subsequent #NoTechForICE and No Tech For Apartheid campaigns were structured to address by addressing the supply chain as a chain rather than as a single named contractor.

Carriage into the corpus

Two corpus-side propagation paths anchor the framing in this graph. The direct downstream lineage is into #NoTechForICE, the October 2018 Mijente-led campaign that translated the Google workers' "no [tech] for [state-violence system]" rhetorical form into the immigration-enforcement supply-chain register, six months after Google's withdrawal from Maven and inside the same Trump-administration political-cycle window. The campaign's working architecture — tech-worker dissent inside the contracting companies, student-side pressure on the tech-talent recruitment pipeline, faith and civil-liberties coalition pressure, direct-action confrontations — is the documented organisational template the Google Maven campaign developed, generalised by Mijente to a cross-company coalition addressing a single state-violence supply chain. The further downstream lineage is into No Tech For Apartheid, whose 12 October 2021 anonymous Guardian open letter by more than 500 Google and Amazon workers explicitly traces the lineage in its own text — "we have watched Google and Amazon aggressively pursue contracts with institutions like the US Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and state and local police departments" — naming the Maven, ICE, and police-contracting cases as the prior worker-dissent record on which the Nimbus letter is built.

The framing also surfaces inside the corpus through the Stop Killer Robots campaign chronology, which records Google's June 2018 withdrawal from Maven and its adoption of weapons-excluding AI principles as a milestone in the autonomous-weapons advocacy coalition's own public-record timeline — the documented intersection between the humanitarian-disarmament register and the tech-worker conscience register on the same corporate-supply question.

The framing's authoring body — an autonomous cross-team employee group inside Google — is not formally an organisation, has no institutional name beyond the company that employed its members, and is not represented as an Org or Local Group entry in this corpus. Structurally parallel to msg-pause-giant-ai-experiments — whose authoring body (the Future of Life Institute) is also outside the corpus's grassroots-organising remit, and where the in-corpus anchor is the downstream grassroots-organising vehicle (PauseAI) the framing seeded — this message's in-corpus carriage runs through the downstream messages and campaigns the framing's organising template seeded rather than through a propagating organisation already in corpus.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framing durable.

First, it pairs a single concrete contract-withdrawal demand with a structural policy commitment. The contract demand — cancel Maven — gave the campaign a specific operational object to point to, with a specific counterparty (the DoD), a specific renewal date (March 2019), and a specific corporate-policy decision (renew or not) that could be won or lost. The structural commitment — "neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology" — lifted the demand off the single contract and onto the corporate-policy register, supplying the long-run organising target the AI Principles publication translated into a written corporate-policy document. Most subsequent tech-worker conscience campaigns have inherited this two-level architecture; the single-contract demand provides legibility and the policy-commitment demand provides durability.

Second, it built the corporate-policy outcome on an internal worker-organising apparatus rather than on external coalition pressure alone. The cross-team employee group that organised the letter — spanning Cloud, AI, Communications, Brain, and DeepMind — was the campaign's load-bearing structure; the external coalition pressure (the Tech Workers Coalition petition, the ICRAC academic letter) reinforced the internal pressure rather than substituting for it. The corporate-policy revision Google made — non-renewal plus AI Principles — was a response to an internal employee constituency, not to external coalition demands alone. That internal-worker-base architecture is the feature the subsequent worker letters at Amazon (the same period's Rekognition campaign), at Microsoft (the HoloLens campaign at the US Army), at Salesforce (the CBP contract campaign), and at Google again on Nimbus (the 2021 letter) all adopted as their primary organising form rather than reverting to the external-coalition-only template that the autonomous-weapons advocacy field had been working with.

Third, the framing supplies a portable rhetorical template. "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war" is a single-sentence employer-naming opening that compresses the worker-side conscientious-objection move ("we, who work here, do not want to build this") into a sentence that travels. The form is the building block of the no-tech-for-X grammar that the subsequent #NoTechForICE and No Tech For Apartheid campaigns ran on, and the documented public-record artefact in which the worker-side corporate-complicity objection was first staged in the AI / machine-learning context at scale.