A Google employee said he was forced to resign after criticism of the company’s $1.2 billion secret artificial intelligence project with the Israeli government. Gizmodo writes about it.

Ariel Coren, head of marketing at Google, said he had “no choice but to leave the company.” According to him, he faced revenge and “illegal acts” from the tech giant.

Coren had previously filed several petitions urging the company to drop a contract known as Project Nimbus. One of them was signed by more than 800 Google employees and 37,500 public members.

There are no details about Project Nimbus. According to some reports, this is a joint project between Google and Amazon that will provide artificial intelligence and cloud-based tools to the Israeli government and military.

According to Coren and others at the company, Project Nimbus violates the tech giant’s own AI principles. The tools provided could “expand Israel’s plan for surveillance, racial profiling and other human rights abuses through technology,” they said.

“Instead of listening to the employees […]Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and depriving its employees of their voices, silencing them and starting to take revenge on me and others,” Koren wrote.

According to a former employee, at the end of 2021, the company offered him a choice: move to the Brazilian office or lose his job. Coren claims there is no reason to move, and the ultimatum is actually a “creative” way to get him to leave without being fired.

A Google spokesperson denied the former employee’s remarks and said the company prohibits publicized pressure from the workplace.

“We have carefully examined this worker’s claim. […] “Our investigation has shown that there is no revenge here,” he said.

Also, a representative of the tech giant supported Project Nimbus.

“We are proud that the Israeli government has chosen Google Cloud to provide public cloud services to help the country’s digital transformation,” he said.

A Google spokesperson added that the project is designed to handle day-to-day tasks in finance, healthcare, transportation and education.

“It does not target highly sensitive or classified workloads,” he said.

In early 2022, Coren filed a unfair labor practices complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. According to journalists, the investigation did not reveal any misconduct.

Recall that in July Google fired Blake Lemoine, an engineer who discovered the “mind” in the LaMDA AI algorithm.

In May, the tech giant fired an artificial intelligence researcher after criticizing the company. The engineer disputed the claim that algorithms could design chips more efficiently than humans.

In April 2021, the head of Google’s AI division left the company after 14 years with the company. His departure was linked to the controversial dismissals of Timnita Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, two leading researchers in artificial intelligence ethics.