Former Google CEO promotes integration of Google and Anduril tech for use by Pentagon
Former Google CEO promotes integration of Google and Anduril tech for use by Pentagon
At an event hosted today by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt including high-level defense officials, the sole tech demo was for space networking built on Google tech being integrated with Anduril.
As part of the closing talk of an event today honoring the legacy of former Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley alluded to the centrality of cellphone and wearable device location-tracking in U.S. military strategy:
“We are in an age of incredible surveillance. An age in which we have sensors that can detect anyone, anywhere, at any time, on the Earth’s surface and — most of the time — subsurface. We have the ubiquitous ability to sense the environment…and that will only increase…Just think of Fitbits and GPS watches and your iPhone…Think of the space-based capability and the electronic signatures that everything gives…And what you can see, you can shoot.”
Milley’s host was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), an informal privatized continuation of the Congressionally-mandated National Security Commission on AI, which Schmidt also chaired. (Incidentally, Fitbit was acquired by Google nine months before Schmidt announced SCSP.)
Today’s “Ash Carter Exchange”, which lasted roughly ten hours, was a who’s who of the Pentagon’s militarization of artificial intelligence. Beyond Milley, the first panel alone included: two former Secretaries of Defense (Robert M. Gates and Leon Panetta), a former CIA Director (also Panetta), former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and the former head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service, Alexander W. Younger.
Other speakers included: the current Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Charles Q. Brown Jr., the Chief Digital and AI Officer, Craig Martell, the heads of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Deputy National Security Advisors Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall and Ann Neuberger. While not a marquee attendee, Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work was arguably the second-most central government figure — behind Ash Carter — in the Pentagon’s push for the militarization of commercially-developed artificial intelligence.
As is typical in privately run military and intelligence events, the lines between the U.S. government and private industry became murky. During a fireside chat which started at roughly 11:15am ET today, Eric Schmidt remarked that there is no single number that companies can call when they want to work with the U.S. Government. Moments later, Michèle Flournoy, the head of national security consulting firm WestExec Advisors, noted that WestExec sells just such a service. Flournoy co-founded WestExec with current Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and, to date, has staffed more than thirty members of the Biden administration. (Flournoy had herself been in the running to become Biden’s Secretary of Defense, but the position ultimately went to Lloyd J. Austin III.)
Schmidt’s role as the apex predator of militarized commercial artificial intelligence has led to ongoing concerns about conflicts of interest arising during his tenures as Chair of the Defense Innovation Board, National Security Commission on AI, and — now — his personally funded SCSP. Beyond overarching concerns of Schmidt essentially buying national security credentials to be leveraged against anti-trust enforcement on Google, one of the most pointed conflicts of interest has been from his investment in the national security-focused data fusion company Rebellion Defense, whose CEO Chris Lynch also spoke on a panel at today’s event. Despite such advantages, Rebellion Defense recently announced the layoff of roughly 35% of its employees.
(The author also personally attended an event where an employee of the Schmidt-funded America’s Frontier Fund asserted that many of the organizations investments would “10x overnight” in the case of a “kinetic event” in the Pacific. Perhaps as a result, the author’s request to attend today’s event in person was denied by the Special Competitive Studies Project.)
But a fresh conflict of interest arose today, when the sole tech demonstration slot at the SCSP event was given to the CEO of Aalyria Technologies, Chris Taylor. As was repeatedly emphasized by Taylor during his live demo of a simulation of how his company’s software would help preserve communications in the event of satellites being knocked offline during a conflict with China, Aalyria is built on technology which the company purchased from Google, which also fills its advisory board and is listed as a partner. According to the current homepage, Aalyria “brings together two technologies originally developed at Alphabet as part of its wireless connectivity efforts: atmospheric laser communications technology and a software platform for orchestrating networks across land, sea, air, space and beyond”.
Taylor noted during his demonstration this evening that his company had earlier today announced a partnership with the data fusion platform of software-first defense contractor Anduril. Aalyria’s common operating picture for satellite communications, Spacetime, is planning to integrate with Anduril’s data platform, Lattice. Such a close partnership between Google and a company notorious for its role surveilling immigrants for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is not without precedent: three years ago the author discovered through a Freedom of Information request that defense contractor Thundercat Technology contracted with CBP to apply Google Cloud’s AI to the thermal imagery from Anduril’s Sentry Towers. (Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian later denied that the contract’s statement of work would be carried out.)
The integration of Alphabet’s wireless connectivity technology with Anduril’s Lattice platform is part of preserving — in the parlance of Milley — what U.S. military and intelligence agencies can “see” and “shoot”. And while today’s event was nominally dedicated to the legacy of Ash Carter, the most effusive praise went to its funder, Eric Schmidt. During his panel with Flournoy and former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, both Flournoy and McMaster gave credit to Schmidt for reversing the ‘post-Snowden’ reluctance of U.S. tech companies to work with the Pentagon. McMaster went so far as to joke that, in regards to the U.S. military’s recent efforts to incorporate artificial intelligence, “I think the people I put at the top of my list to thank [are] Eric Schmidt…quickly followed by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin”.