Google promoting founder of Google Israel R&D to global research chief days after firing 28 workers for protesting cloud contract with Israeli military
The son of new Google Research chief Yossi Mathias is former officer of elite Israeli hacking unit and CEO of Clarity, which has worked with Israeli government on analyzing footage from Oct. 7.
Update on 2024-04-23: Google fired an additional 20 workers for their alleged connections to protests against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli military, raising the number of employees fired over Project Nimbus to roughly 50.
Roughly three years after Google and Amazon edged out Oracle to share a roughly $1.2 billion cloud modernization contract with the Israeli government known as Project Nimbus, Google swiftly fired 28 of its employees for livestreaming an occupation of the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian as part of an escalation of their multi-year “No Tech For Apartheid” campaign against Nimbus. Nine Google workers participating in the protests were arrested on Tuesday, and 28 employees were confirmed as fired the next day.
The increased concern from the Google protestors results from Israel’s ongoing invasion of the Gaza Strip, known as Operation Swords of Iron, which has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children. After an initial period of sympathy due to the catalytic attack from Hamas on October 7th, which resulted in the death of an estimated 695 Israeli civilians, governments and international human rights groups have accused Israel of committing an ongoing genocide against Palestinians, largely armed by the Biden administration.
The major question driving the “No Tech For Apartheid” campaign against Google’s Nimbus contract has been to what degree Google’s cloud computing and artificial intelligence products are supporting the Israeli military’s AI-driven targeted killings in Gaza. Similar questions have been asked regarding the role of the American data fusion company Palantir, with the Israeli business news outlet Globes reporting that the company was passed over by Israeli military intelligence in favor of domestic alternatives.
As previously uncovered by the author two years ago, Google’s own training materials for Nimbus listed the Israeli Ministry of Defense as a customer and included video tutorials for creating custom artificial intelligence models on top of proprietary datasets through the company’s AutoML tool. In response to recent confirmation of Google’s work with the Israel Defense Forces in TIME magazine, Google repeated its longstanding assertion that Nimbus “is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Simultaneous to international coverage of Google’s firing of 28 workers for protesting Nimbus, Globes reported that the founder of Google’s Israeli research and development center, former Israeli Air Force pilot Yossi Matias, had been promoted to head the entirety of Google Research. The announcement was publicly confirmed on Friday by Mr. Matias’s son Michael, a former officer in the elite Israeli signals intelligence component known as Unit 8200 who is now CEO of the video authentication company Clarity. According to Michael’s LinkedIn profile, between 2019 and 2020 he “founded two AI teams to integrate machine learning and deep learning into cyber systems” within Unit 8200. (Clarity’s website further boasts of the previous Unit 8200 experience of the company’s COO and CSO, Gil Avriel, as well as of a full stack engineer and a customer success employee.)
After leaving Israeli intelligence, the son of the new head of Google Research spent roughly two years with J-Ventures, a venture capital firm closely tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) which has described itself as a “capitalist kibbutz” and which was exposed by the author to have helped coordinate the firing of pro-Palestinian tech employees and executives.
Another former venture partner with J-Ventures has similar high-level ties to Google: Jordan Blashek, a previous vice president of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s policy shop Schmidt Futures, is currently president and COO of America’s Frontier Fund, which is similarly backed by Schmidt. As previously reported by the author, Blashek attended a private meeting hosted by J-Ventures where former IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus encouraged participants to maintain pro-Israeli pressure “in universities or media, or think tanks, or in elite circles.”
Beyond a brief internship at Google in the summer of 2013, Michael Matias was a visiting fellow at the Schmidt-backed venture capital firm Innovation Endeavors in 2022. But the son of the new head of Google Research is best known for an interview he conducted with The Times of Israel in October, where he accused Hamas of using deepfakes against Israel, though he declined to provide any examples for security reasons. In an interview at the end of February, Michael noted that his company “work[s] very actively with intelligence agencies and government organizations to verify the media in the context of the [Gaza] war.”
Disclaimer: The author worked at Google Research circa May 2016 to September 2018.