Microsoft employees have signed a letter calling on executives to ditch a proposed bid for a US military contract that would see the technology giant providing computer power for artificial intelligence to be used in warfare for the next ten years.
The letter accuses of Microsoft of betraying its principles "in exchange for short-term profits" in a plan that would force employees to build a product who have no idea "whether our work is being used to aid profiling, surveillance, or killing".
"Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war.
"When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of 'empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,' not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality," the letter continued.
Little is know about what the government plan to use the proposed cloud system, named the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI).
At an industry conference to discuss JEDI, the US Defence Department's chief management officer John Gibson revealed that the controversial program was “truly about increasing the lethality of our department”.
Google said has pulled out of the bidding war, claiming it could not be sure it would not conflict with its AI principles. The company faced internal revolt for its participation in the US military's
MAVEN program.
Admissions for JEDI bids closed on Friday and the open letter signed by Microsoft staff was published on blogging website Medium in the evening.
“Microsoft submitted its bid on the JEDI contract on the October 12 deadline. While we don’t have a way to verify the authenticity of this letter, we always encourage employees to share their views with us," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
The contract has proven to be highly controversial for other reasons. Some of the largest cloud providers in the world claim have spoken out to slam the process as both anti-competitive and potentially a security risk for the military.
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