alt Hacker NewsGoogle and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI
Comments
Who could have seen this one coming. From yesterday: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-pentagon-classified-u... ("Hundreds of Google workers urge CEO to refuse classified AI work with Pentagon").
Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.
This all works if you assume that any action the government takes must be “lawful”. The assumption here is that the Pentagon is obeying the law and any unlawful use would go through normal reporting / violation channels - same as any illegal order or violation or whistleblower report.
The Pentagon does not want Google or anyone else deciding what they can and cannot use their AI for. They’re saying we won’t break the law, and that should be enough for you - pinky swear!
And that seems to be enough for Google. Though I might request some auditing capability that is agentic to verify rather than take them at their word.
Next step: is Google FEDRAMP’d yet for this and for classified enclaves? Or do they also go through Palantir’s AI vehicle?
Who defines "lawful" if Google and the Pentagon disagree?
> The classified deal apparently doesn’t allow Google to veto how the government will use its AI models.
Seems concerning?
No remedies, no right.
What are the consequences of breach? Otherwise, Americans only use for this is to wipe their ass, and only if they can find a paper version.
How well does this hold up in terms of legal scrutiny when previous actions indicate that the Pentagon would retaliate against Google if they didn't accept this "lawful use only" farce?
Could Google back out of this agreement later by arguing that they were coerced?
Not trying to suggest that Google would be opposed to doing evil, but curious about how solid this agreement would be in practice.
there is 0 reason that the definitions of 'lawful' for the purposes of these agreements should be classified.
"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal" -- a former president
That's how I'd like Google to behave in regards to dealing with me.
Do not get distracted, that technology is used to kill people.
One observation.
Having your work being used by the govt in ways you disagree with feels similar to having your taxes used in ways you disagree.
When you pay taxes you have no say in the bombs acquired with that and where they are dropped. The latter though doesn't seem to provoke the same push back
> We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight.
And starts the lying to our faces. The public and private (from your own employees!) consensus is that it should not be used for those things at all, regardless of “human oversight.”
The fundamental problem with these "agreements" is that they are utterly nonsensical as written. Google has one idea of "lawful" and what it means; the Pentagon most definitely has a vastly different interpretation meaning "whatever we want". These companies make these agreements because they do not understand (either deliberately or just by the factor of them not understanding the intelligence sector) that when the intelligence community says "we will only use this for lawful purposes," what they are really telling you is something very, very different. With entities like the Pentagon your agreements should probably both define what "lawful" really means and should provide as few ambiguities as you can manage. Ideally you'd provide zero ambiguities but I'm not sure that's achievable in practice.
And in love and war all is fair...
Reality is this ship sailed once the US/Palantir rolled out AI target selection
Meh.
Lawful didn't stop Project MKUltra, or attacking countless countries, or overthrowing countless governments, or murdering countless people, or kidnapping people and torturing them, or...
The USA can do anything it wants, to anyone, any time.
Huh. I never realized the T-800 runs on Android. Makes sense, I guess.
Snakes. All of them
Unsurprising from Google, but still bad. If Google has no right to object to a particular use, this is equivalent in practice to "any use, lawful or not".
Lawful means nothing but "according to law", which is a meaningless statement...
Remember that even the third Reich had laws!
Is Iran already a vibe war or those are just coming?
Reminder that this administration has some absolute howler theories about what constitutes lawful behavior[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/tom-homan-fbi...
And that is news-worthy because unlawful use is normal?
Refusing to participate WORKS.
I've had the unfortunate experience of working at a startup that started courting some autonomous weapons companies and HOLY SHIT were they the bottom of the barrel. Levels of incompetence you wouldn't believe, just good ol' boys who wanted to play with energetics. Then the company I was working for also hemorrhaged all their top engineers because they found the work unsettling.
The takeaway is that your refusal to assist these shitheads does have an impact, they have to pay more for talent and they have a much harder time courting good talent.
and the pentagon determines the law?
It's pretty funny how these guys are all becoming some kind of internet version of, like, Halliburton. It seems pretty desperate. B2C and B2B applications didn't pan out I guess?
Will lawful use be determined in secret courts a la NSA and FISA?
The sign contract for any lawful use ?? Can you sign a contract with US government for some unlawful use??
These deals / arrangements / affronts / conspiracies will continue as long as there are sums of money too large to say no to.
It's so unbelievable obvious at this point that the Pentagon, and everything like it across the globe, needs a deprecation plan. We don't need these massive states anymore for security or regularity; we can communicate around the world at the speed of light and bypass their notions of how we're supposed to relate to one another.
Enough is enough. Spin down the nukes. Bring home the ships. Send the money back.
Lawful is meaningless in the context of the Trump administration. Should Google waver (which they won't), they'll be declared a supply chain risk or otherwise bullied into submission.
Do no evil. Well don't make anything illegal at least. I mean, let's not do what is different from whatever we wish at the moment.
What a handy word "lawful".
The beginning of Skynet 6.0.
"don't be evil"
There's a lot of money in genocide.
As a big critic of the OpenAI deal, this kinda sounds like a nothingburger to me. Of course Google doesn't get a veto on operational decisions, no customer would ever agree to such a thing. The problem with OpenAI was that they took advantage of Anthropic standing their ground to wedge their way in, which was both bad on its own terms and raises serious concerns about whether they're being honest on the real terms of the deal.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Capital and Big Tech have always been opportunistic enablers, not principled actors. Corporate Values have always been nothing but internal propaganda. "Don't be evil", what a farce.
[dead]
When my sister and I would play monopoly as kids, we had lost the manual so whenever we didn’t like the outcome of whatever happened, we would make up rules about what was right. Technically then, it was very easy stay compliant while still being able to do well because we could rewrite the rules.
Also, since I was older I feel like I was able to get away with those redefinitions a lot more often…