Google has been directly assisting the IDF and Israel’s Defense Ministry, an exclusive Washington Post report revealed on Wednesday.
Since the first few weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, the employees at Google have worked to provide Israel’s military with access to its most advanced artificial intelligence, the report continues.
This has happened contrary to Google’s public efforts to separate itself from Israel’s military and security bodies, following protests by its own employees over a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
The Washington Post, citing documents it obtained, claimed that a Google employee in the cloud division expedited requests from Israel’s Defense Ministry for increased access to Google AI.
According to the report, Israel wished to quickly increase its use of Google’s Vertex service, a machine learning platform that allows users to train and deploy ML models and AI.
The incentive for expediting the request reportedly stemmed from fears that not providing urgent access to Vertex would push the IDF toward Google’s cloud rival, Amazon.
Amazon also works with Israel under the same Nimbus contract, a $4 billion endeavor to provide cloud services from an Israeli region. This ensures sovereignty and privacy of information in accordance with Israeli law.
In 2024, Google fired 50 employees who had been protesting against the ‘Nimbus’ contract, believing the technology would be used by military forces to harm Palestinians. In 2021, Google and Amazon workers penned an open letter to The Guardian calling for the condemnation of “Project Nimbus.”
Additional AI access
Several other documents from 2023 and 2024 revealed how Google employees requested additional AI access for the IDF.
In November 2024, a Google employee pushed for the IDF to have access to Gemini AI technology, which allows users to develop an AI assistant to process documents and audio.
The documents obtained by the Washington Post did not show how Israel planned to use Google AI, however, Google has previously said that the provision of its Nimbus cloud services to Israel is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Nevertheless, Gaby Portnoy, director of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, indicated at a 2024 conference that the Nimbus contract was directly involved in combat applications.
“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,” he said, according to People and Computers, an Israeli outlet.
Neither the IDF nor Google replied to the Washington Post’s request for comment.
AI usage in IDF
Israel has been integrating AI into the military for several years, using the technology to process surveillance footage.
A previous December 2024 investigation by the Washington Post found that the IDF uses an AI tool called Habsora to provide commanders with thousands of targets to strike, both human and infrastructure.
According to the Washington Post, Habsora analyzes data, such as intercepted communications and satellite imagery, to generate coordinates for potential targets.
The revelation led to fears that the AI was being used to endanger lives; however, the IDF disputed this in a statement in the paper at the time.
“The more ability you have to compile pieces of information effectively, the more accurate the process is,” the IDF said.
“If anything, these tools have minimized collateral damage and raised the accuracy of the human-led process.”
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