Google facilitated AI tools for Israeli military during war on Gaza, says report

Google provided the Israeli military with access to its latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology from the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

Shortly after the beginning of the war in October 2023, a Google employee in its cloud division escalated requests for Israel’s defence ministry to have increased access to the company’s AI tools, according to documents obtained by the Post.

The defence ministry urgently wanted to expand usage of Google’s Vertex, which apply AI algorithm’s to a client’s own data.

An employee at Google warned that if the company did not give Israel’s military more access, it would risk losing out to cloud rival Amazon.

Under the $1.2bn “Project Nimbus” partnership, both Google and Amazon already provide cloud computing and AI services to Israel’s government and army.

A document from November 2023 showed a Google employee thanking a co-worker for handling the Israeli defence ministry request, and documents from the spring and summer of 2024 show employees requesting additional access to AI technology for Israel’s military. 

There were documents as recent as November 2024, indicating Israeli military use of Google’s AI tools as well as a request by the military for use of Google’s Gemini AI technology.

The documents don’t explicitly show how Israel’s defence ministry used the AI tools, the report noted.

The Post has previously reported that after the outbreak of war in Gaza, the Israeli military turned to an internal AI tool called Habsora, which was used to provide Israeli commanders with thousands of Palestinian targets in the besieged enclave.

Israeli commanders raised concerns to the Post about the accuracy of the technology, while others said too much trust was being placed in the tool’s recommendations.

Over the past year, Google has faced intense internal dissent after it fired 50 employees for staging sit-ins to oppose Project Nimbus at the company’s offices in New York and California.

Under the banner of “Googlers against Genocide”, workers told Middle East Eye how they have endured intimidation from the company and other workers for their pro-Palestine activism.

‘Matching donations to IDF charity’

Project Nimbus, announced in 2021 by Google and Amazon, provides advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to Israel’s government.

Google maintains that the Nimbus contract “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services”.

Google, Amazon and the Israeli military declined to comment on the Post’s report. 

Last month, MEE reported that Google had been matching donations made by its employees across the world to pro-Israeli charities in the US, including one supporting Israeli soldiers who were fighting in Gaza, and a Christian Zionist group that aimed to help Israel “reclaim” the West Bank.

Leaked internal webpages seen by MEE showed that the company had helped facilitate donations to a non-profit called Friends of the Israeli Defence Forces (FIDF), and HaYovel, an organisation that sends volunteers to work on farms in illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.