“فضيحة Google: تورط الشركة في تعزيز قدرات الجيش الإحتلال الإسرائيلي بالذكاء الاصطناعي بعد هجوم 7 أكتوبر!”

“فضيحة Google: تورط الشركة في تعزيز قدرات الجيش الكيان الإسرائيلي بالذكاء الاصطناعي بعد طوفان الأقصى وثائق تكشف كيف حوّلت الشركة التكنولوجيا إلى أداة حرب في غزة.”

كشفت وثائق حصلت عليها “The Washington Post” أن شركة Google سارعت لتلبية طلبات الجيش الاحتلال الإسرائيلي للحصول على المزيد من الوصول إلى أدوات الذكاء الاصطناعي في أعقاب طوفان الأقصى في 7 أكتوبر 2023، وذلك في إطار منافستها مع Amazon.

وأظهرت الوثائق الداخلية أن موظفي Google عملوا على توفير تقنيات الذكاء الاصطناعي المتطورة للجيش العدوان الإسرائيلي منذ الأسابيع الأولى للحرب على غزة، وذلك على الرغم من جهود الشركة السابقة لإبعاد نفسها عن التعاون المباشر مع الأجهزة الأمنية الإسرائيلية. وجاءت هذه الخطوة بعد احتجاجات داخلية من موظفي Google ضد عقد “نيمبوس” للحوسبة السحابية مع الكيان الإسرائيلي، والذي أثار مخاوف من استخدام التكنولوجيا في برامج عسكرية واستخباراتية تضر بالفلسطينيين.

ووفقًا للوثائق، قام موظف في قسم الحوسبة السحابية بشركة Google بتسريع طلبات وزارة الدفاع الكيان الصهيوني للحصول على وصول أوسع لتقنية “Vertex” الخاصة بالشركة، والتي تسمح للعملاء بتطبيق خوارزميات الذكاء الاصطناعي على بياناتهم. وحذر الموظف من أن عدم الاستجابة السريعة قد يدفع الجيش الكيان الإسرائيلي للتحول إلى منافس Google، Amazon، التي تعمل أيضًا مع الكيان الصهيوني بموجب عقد “نيمبوس”.

كما أظهرت الوثائق أن الجيش الإحتلال طلب في نوفمبر 2023 الوصول إلى تقنية “Gemini” للذكاء الاصطناعي من Google لتطوير مساعد ذكاء اصطناعي خاص به لمعالجة المستندات والصوت. ولم توضح الوثائق كيفية استخدام الجيش الإحتلال الإسرائيلي لهذه التقنيات، لكنها أشارت إلى أن Google واصلت توفير الدعم التقني للجيش الصهيوني حتى نوفمبر 2024.

من جهتها، أكدت Google سابقًا أن عقد “نيمبوس” مع الكيان الصهيوني لا يشمل “أحمال عمل عسكرية أو استخباراتية حساسة أو سرية”. ومع ذلك، أثارت هذه الخطوات مخاوف لدى بعض الموظفين ومنظمات حقوق الإنسان، خاصة في ظل استخدام الجيش الكيان الإسرائيلي لتقنيات الذكاء الاصطناعي في عمليات عسكرية، مثل أداة “هبسورا” التي تُستخدم لتحديد الأهداف العسكرية في غزة.

يذكر أن Google وAmazon وقعتا عقد “نيمبوس” مع الكيان الصهيوني في عام 2021، والذي يتضمن بناء مراكز بيانات وتوفير خدمات سحابية. وقد واجه العقد احتجاجات من موظفي الشركتين الذين يعارضون التعاون مع الكيان الصهيوني بسبب انتهاكات حقوق الإنسان ضد الفلسطينيين.

وكانت Google قد أقالت أكثر من 50 موظفًا العام الماضي بعد احتجاجاتهم على العقد، مما أثار جدلًا حول دور الشركات التكنولوجية الكبرى في الصراعات العسكرية وانعكاسات ذلك على حقوق الإنسان.

مقالة واشنطن بوست

Google rushed to sell AI tools to Israel’s military after Hamas attack
The company fulfilled requests from Israel’s military for more access to AI tools, as it sought to compete with Amazon, documents obtained by The Post show.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google employees have worked to provide Israel’s military with access to the company’s latest artificial intelligence technology from the early weeks of the Israel-Gaza war, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The internal documents show Google directly assisting Israel’s Defense Ministry and the Israel Defense Forces, despite the company’s efforts to publicly distance itself from the country’s national security apparatus after employee protests against a cloud computing contract with Israel’s government.

Google fired more than 50 employees last year after they protested the contract, known as Nimbus, over fears it could see Google technology aid military and intelligence programs that have harmed Palestinians.

In the weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas militants, a Google employee in its cloud division escalated requests for increased access to the company’s AI technology from Israel’s Defense Ministry, the documents obtained by The Post show.

The documents, which detail projects inside Google’s cloud division, indicate that the Israeli ministry urgently wanted to expand its use of a Google service called Vertex, which clients can use to apply AI algorithms to their own data.

A Google employee warned in one document that if the company didn’t quickly provide more access, the military would turn instead to Google’s cloud rival Amazon, which also works with Israel’s government under the Nimbus contract.

Another document, from mid-November 2023, showed the employee thanking a co-worker for helping handle the Defense Ministry request. The documents do not indicate exactly how the Defense Ministry planned to use Google’s AI technology or how it might have contributed to military operations.

As recently as November 2024, by which time a year of Israeli airstrikes had turned much of Gaza to rubble, documents show Israel’s military was still tapping Google for its latest AI technology. Late that month, an employee requested access to the company’s Gemini AI technology for the IDF, which wanted to develop its own AI assistant to process documents and audio, according to the documents.

Spokespeople for the IDF, Google and Amazon all declined to comment for this article.

Google has previously said that the Nimbus contract with Israel’s government is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

The documents obtained by The Post do not indicate how Israel’s military used Google’s AI capabilities, which can be used for tasks such as automating administrative functions far from the front lines.

Gaby Portnoy, director general of the Israeli government’s National Cyber Directorate, suggested at a conference early last year that the Nimbus contract directly aided combat applications, according to an article from People and Computers, the Israeli media outlet that hosted the conference.

“Thanks to the Nimbus public cloud, phenomenal things are happening during the fighting, these things play a significant part in the victory — I will not elaborate,” he said.

Israel’s military has for years been expanding its AI capabilities to speed up processing of surveillance imagery and selection of potential military targets.

After the IDF began its assault on Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks, it turned to an AI tool called Habsora developed internally to provide commanders with thousands of human and infrastructure targets to bomb, contributing to the violence in Gaza, according to a previous investigation by The Post.

Habsora is built on top of hundreds of algorithms that analyze data such as intercepted communications and satellite imagery to generate coordinates of potential military targets such as rockets or tunnels. But some Israeli commanders have raised concerns about the technology’s accuracy, The Post reported. Others worried that too much trust was being placed in the technology’s recommendations, eroding the quality of Israeli intelligence analysis.

It is unclear whether the Habsora project or its development involved the use of commercial cloud computing services.

A senior IDF official told The Post in an interview last summer that the military had invested heavily in new cloud technologies, hardware and other back-end computing systems, often in partnership with U.S. companies. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security topics.

The IDF also tested technology from multiple companies as it explored potential applications for generative AI, the technology behind the recent flourishing of chatbots and other AI tools, the official said. The uses included scanning audio, video and text from IDF systems as part of an audit of the military’s operations leading into the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

Google has been a major contractor to Israel’s government since 2021, when it, along with Amazon, was selected by Israeli officials for the multibillion-dollar Nimbus cloud computing contract aimed at making sweeping upgrades to Israeli government technology. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.

The deal saw the rival companies build data centers in Israel and agree to provide cloud software and storage to government departments. At the time, Israeli officials told local media that the deal would include working with the Israeli military.

Nimbus has faced protests from some Google and Amazon employees, who say their companies shouldn’t do business with Israel’s government because of its treatment of Palestinians.

The loudest protests have come from Google workers who are concerned that the contract might allow its AI technology to be enlisted by Israeli military and intelligence agencies that they believe regularly violate human rights in Gaza and the West Bank.

When Google acquired the British AI start-up DeepMind in 2014, the terms of the acquisition stipulated that DeepMind technology would never be used for military or surveillance purposes, lab founder Demis Hassabis said in a 2015 interview. Today, Hassabis is one of the company’s most powerful executives and leads all its AI development work under the brand Google DeepMind, a portfolio that includes image, video and voice technologies and its generative AI assistant Gemini.

Google has AI policies that pledge the company will not apply the technology to uses that harm people. Its human rights program says the company reviews its products and policies for compliance with international standards like the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and invites employees to raise any concerns they have about the company’s work.

Last summer, a group of more than 100 employees emailed Google managers and members of the company’s human rights team asking them to review the company’s work with the Israeli military, according to a Google employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. The requests were ignored, the employee said.