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Google to provide Pentagon with AI agents
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/10/google-deepens-pentagon-ai-push-after-anthropic-sues-trump-admin.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/10/google-deepens-pentagon-ai-p...
- conartist6 8mo agoGoogle to help staff the Pentagon with sycophantic incompetent sociopaths! Hooray! Will I be the only one concerned that amplifying bullshit might run contrary to the mission of the national defense
- rvz 8mo agoAt this point, the employees at Google who signed that open letter might as well call it quits and leave. Google already has military contracts the Pentagon previously, so this is not surprising at all. To them, this is just another Tuesday.
- postsantum 8mo ago> sycophantic incompetent sociopaths It's possible to use just one word for it but I don't want to get banned
- brettkromkamp 8mo agoSo it begins.
- SecureVillage27 8mo agoSounds sketchy as hell but the article suggests its for unclassified work, like "drafting meeting notes, creating action items, and breaking large projects into step-by-step plans". I think I'd be more annoyed if my government weren't using tools to make BS work more efficient.
- duskdozer 8mo agoIt does those things poorly.
- reedf1 8mo agoPete Hegseth: Hey Google, what are the best bits of Iran to bomb to maximize civilian damage?
- blitzar 8mo agoYou are absolutely right. Here is a list of schools.
- aurareturn 8mo agoWasn't Claude already used with Palantir to choose Iran bombing targets?
- blitzar 8mo agoI don't know exactly how I would feel if the software I created selected a school to bomb and then suggested bombing the rescue parties trying to find / save any unexploded children 40 minutes later (double tap strategy to kill rescue parties and/or medics). It wouldn't be good though.
- torben-friis 8mo agoThat 'let claude wing it, then send for review' approach that your lazy coworker uses is now how the largest military in the world operates. No big drama.
- duskdozer 8mo agoFortunately for the government, there's no lack of "I'm just here for the tech, keep politics out of this" developers
- elil17 8mo ago"Don't be evil"
- sbarre 8mo agoSorry that's on page 5 of the search results, so it doesn't exist.
- richsouth 8mo agoI think that went into the Google Graveyard years ago
- dotancohen 8mo agoWhat is evil about working with the government of the country in which they were founded and operate?
- Tklaaaalo 8mo agoJust beause doesn't mean you support war. Do you support the current Iran war and the way its handled? Opposition and critisism (normally done by the independent press and the party not in power) is there to align. With trump you have 'deals' of rich people doing other rich people favours. They do not care about human lives
- dotancohen 8mo agoOf course I support the war against the regime that chants "Death to America" and is building a nuclear bomb. What kind of question is that?
- Tklaaaalo 8mo agoYour regime plays global police and killed the leader of that country instead of talking. "Death to America" wasn't a action, it was a reaction. But its great we can stop discussing this anyway if you see war as a black/white thing. 9/11 was one reaction of the middle east to americas behaviour and it will be interesting to see what terrorism will happen in the USA after this war.
- zthrowaway 8mo agoThis should surprise no one. A CIA-backed VC was one of the first investors of Google. Big tech will always serve the powers that be. Employees that think their letters of appeal will do anything live in a fantasy land. That’s not how the real world works.
- dotancohen 8mo agoWhat is wrong with a company serving the country in which it operates?
- Tistron 8mo agoSurely that depends heavily on the country.
- dotancohen 8mo agoThe country in question is the United States of America. You know, the one that Iranian Islamic Republic officials lead chants of "Death to America" about. The US is not perfect, but this disparagement of the US for the benefit of the Islamic Republic is disgusting. As is the online bullying of people who stand up for the US.
- Tistron 8mo agoJust because there one or maybe several bad/worse countries in the world, that doesn't mean anything goes ethically. That's a dangerous line of reasoning.
- claudiulodro 8mo agoEngineering Ethics is a standard required class in any engineering discipline and a whole field of discussion. The ethics of working on military stuff (or even just government stuff) is nowhere near as cut and dry as your question seems to imply. For example: - What if the country asked you to develop technology to track and hack journalists or political rivals the administration doesn't like? - What if the country asked you to develop chemical weapons? Is it different if the weapons would be used on their own population or only on external "enemies"? - What if the country asked you to personally assassinate a civilian of another country? What if they asked you to create a program that would do that? What if they asked you to simply create a list of targets, and you knew they'd be assassinated? - What if the country asked you to build something in an unsafe way that you're pretty certain will cause harm to people? - What if the country asked you to make a public statement lying about the purpose behind what you're building?
- glimshe 8mo agoSilicon Valley started with the military... And the military won't ever go away.
- spwa4 8mo agoCan you name even a single large company that wasn't created by the state? And yes, maybe created means "picked up a tiny company and made it big", I'm treating that as the same (ie. Amazon) Also the whole internet started as a military project. The big reason, especially when it comes to Silicon Valley's tech is that people just don't want it until they can see what it does.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- glimshe 8mo agoWell... We're kind of saying the same thing, I just said it from another perspective. I meant to say that the military created it, so the military will stay around to reap the dividends.
- Noaidi 8mo agoIf (IF!) the U.S. government is a corrupt authoritarian regime does it matter what services Google was providing? When is the point we see that boycotting these companies that are helping kill, lets say 100 little girls with a tomahawk missiles, is the very least we can do?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago"“We’re starting with unclassified because that’s where most of the users are, and then we’ll get to classified and top secret,” Michael said in an interview, adding that talks with Google over using the agents on the classified cloud are underway."
- cmiles8 8mo agoCompanies are getting desperate to show AI adoption as right now the numbers just don’t add up. Not surprisingly companies are willing to get into bed with more and more questionable use cases if it helps show some desperately needed AI adoption revenue.
- nxobject 8mo agoAnd, in a post-ZIRP era, guess where all of the easy money for growth is coming from? Yup, deficit-funded defense spending.
- aurareturn 8mo agoCompanies are getting desperate to show AI adoption as right now the numbers just don’t add up. All compute companies say they don't have enough compute to meet demands. Why do you think there isn't enough AI adoption to justify the investment?
- cmiles8 8mo ago“Demand” is mostly their training of models, which they’ve yet to demonstrate is a profitable business. Just because you’re struggling to get raw materials for your business doesn’t make it a good business. Without strong enterprise adoption ASAP (which is what’s seriously suffering) things are going to hit the fan real quick.
- lancebeet 8mo agoThis will sound snarky, so forgive me, but I honestly don't know the answer. Is this actually true? Is there a reliable source containing statistics on LLM compute usage that includes training vs inference for the whole market?
- concats 8mo agoThe revenue numbers are public for the major AI companies. That's probably the best estimate for "inference for the whole market" we have, since most of that inference is billed in either API usage or subscriptions, and it won't include any in-house usage such as training.
- free652 8mo ago>The DOD’s workforce of more than 3 million people will now be able to use a no-code or low-code tool called Agent Designer to create their own digital assistants for repetitive administrative tasks.
- coffeefirst 8mo agoOh this is dumb. So the problem is filling out forms is too onerous, but rather than fix the process, create a device that fills the form with slop and then another device that approves or rejects the slop form. I could have sworn I signed up for the other future-the one without quite this much stupid.
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoHad the film "Brazil" been written today, AI no doubt would be a significant plot-element.
- _DeadFred_ 8mo agoAs someone who moved from software companies to IT management, seeing this move to fully embrace 'everything in Excel' or basically undefined business use cases/processes moved into software ad hoc and without validation, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Especially for companies that have outsourced IT and expect software to be defined/tested out business processes in supported systems. In house IT is going to be huge in a couple of years sorting out this mess. I would have never guessed the future would be all custom Excel spreadsheets, but instead of Excel just random code in random languages with random data stores.
- CrzyLngPwd 8mo agoWar is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes - Smedley D. Butler ...is as true now as ever.
- mattmaroon 8mo agoHealth care didn’t exist in his day. War’s the second most profitable now.
- max_ 8mo agoHey chat GPT, could you bomb all enemies of the USA. No mistakes, Thanks.
- glemmaPaul 8mo agobe short and concise
- haritha-j 8mo agoHegseth: "Hang on, that last bomb was dropped on a girl's school, not a missile launch site!". Gemini: "You're absolutely right! That's my bad. Here's the actual missile launch target."
- _ink_ 8mo agoGemini: "You're absolutely right! That's my bad. Do you want me to create a press statement deflecting blame to other nations?"
- sebastiennight 8mo agoYou're making many bold assumptions in this single sarcastic post, and they are a credit to your optimistic belief in the candidness of both man and AI.
- PetriCasserole 8mo agoWar Games II anyone?
- cermicelli 8mo agoLet's all boycott Google folks, I want all of HN to band together and in solidarity just not use Google for anything... Let's see if anyone here has the guts to even switch away from GCP, scratch that can folks even move away from Apple(Apple pays for Gemini too) and Android? I do think OpenAI deserves the boycott but people talking about Anthropic as they were taking some kind of ethical stand when it was just ego tripping for everyone involved is insane.
- simianwords 8mo agoEveryone’s scared that it would be used for war but how would they break the alignment on llm models? They don’t even allow me to generate black people on AI. How the hell will it work for war related tasks? Or would there be a separate model fine tuned for government that allows being used to kill people?
- therealdrag0 8mo agoYou don’t say “find people to kill and kill them” you say, “given this list of locations, which ones could be harboring terrorists or hidden military bases?” Etc. Or even more abstract constructs based on domain aliases where AI assists in pattern matching and automation but isn’t really thinking in terms of moral domains.
- josefritzishere 8mo agoTheory: selling half-baked AI options to the government is plan B. It's an alternative to bailing out these financially failing AI companies. This is a delay tactic to prevent a collapse scenario.