Internal documents reveal direct assistance to IDF
Google Cloud provided the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Ministry with artificial intelligence (AI) technology during the Israel/Gaza war.
Reported by The Washington Post, which cites internal documents, the cloud giant "directly" assisted the Defense Ministry in the weeks following the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas.
According to The Post's report, documents show that a Google employee escalated requests for increased access to Google's AI technology from Israel's Defense Ministry.
The documents show that the Israeli ministry particularly wanted to expand its use of Google's Vertex which enables customers to apply AI algorithms to their data. The document suggested that, should Google deny the request, the military might instead give the work to competitor Amazon Web Services.
The Post reports that a separate document from mid-November 2023 showed the employee thanking a co-worker for helping with that request. The documents do not lay out how the Defense Ministry used Google's AI technology.
Further documents from the spring and summer of 2024 show employees requesting access to AI technology for the IDF, which was still using Google as recently as November 2024. An employee also requested access to Gemini AI technology as the IDF wanted to develop an AI assistant for processing documents and audio.
DCD has contacted Google for comment.
Gaby Portnoy, director general of the Israeli government’s National Cyber Directorate said during a conference last year: “Thanks to the Nimbus public cloud, phenomenal things are happening during the fighting, these things play a significant part in the victory – I will not elaborate.”
In April 2024, reports emerged that AWS was being used to store surveillance information of Gaza's population, while Microsoft and Google were also offering AI tools.
Google's relationship with the Israeli government extends to the notorious and controversial Nimbus cloud project. In April 2021, Google and Amazon Web Services won the $1.2bn Nimbus contract to provide cloud services to the Israeli government. That contract prevented Google or Amazon from halting services as a whole, or to particular departments.
Several employees of both AWS and Google protested against that contract, with Google then firing more than 50 employees.
Al Jazeera estimates that since October 7, 2023, 46,707 Palestinians have been killed. Israel and Gaza reached a ceasefire agreement on January 15, 2025.
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