Alphabet Inc.’s Google (GOOGL) has announced in a statement Monday that it will withdraw its bid for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a multi-billion dollar cloud computing contract by the Defense Department. According to its statement to Bloomberg, Google will no longer compete for the contract, which is estimated to be worth $10 billion, because the contract does not align with the company’s principles on how artificial intelligence (AI) should be used.
“We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles. And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications,” said a Google spokesperson.
In June, Google announced that it would not renew it’s contract for the Pentagon’s Project Maven program, which uses artificial intelligence to enhance drone strikes. The company stated that in working on such a project, it was directly involved in warfare.
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The JEDI contract seeks to move massive amounts of DOD data to the cloud. Initial bidding began two months ago and will conclude this week, with leading contenders including Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. According to the Pentagon, the contract will only choose one provider to work with, as it believes that a multiple-award contract “could prevent DOD from rapidly delivering new capabilities and improved effectiveness to the warfighter that enterprise-level cloud computing can enable.”
However, Google’s announcement demonstrated a willingness for the company to work with the contract if it was open to multiple providers, stating that “had the JEDI contract been open to multiple vendors, we would have submitted a compelling solution for portions of it. Google Cloud believes that a multi-cloud approach is in the best interest of government agencies, because it allows them to choose the right cloud for the right workload.”
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