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Tag: Google

  • Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda’

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    Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

    Credit: DeSmog

    Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an AI conference that data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear. Ruth Porat said his “comments were fantastic.”

    This article is being co-published with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.

    At a recent artificial intelligence conference in Washington, D.C., Google’s president cheered on Trump’s interior secretary after he slammed Silicon Valley’s support of the so-called “climate extremist agenda” and pushed to expand the use of “incredibly clean” coal plants and other fossil fuels to power data centers, according to a previously unreported recording.

    Following the speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, told conference attendees that “I thought Secretary Burgum’s comments were fantastic… [B]ecause I think it is very clear that to realize the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it. And we have underinvested in this country, and to stay ahead, we need to actually address it head-on.”

    Porat was speaking on a panel about how AI is “rewriting America’s future,” alongside Big Tech leaders including venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov and Kevin Weil, the chief product officer for OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. During the panel, Porat also discussed a Google white paper advocating for U.S. investments in natural gas and nuclear to power the industry’s energy-hungry data centers.

    Porat’s remarks, captured in an April video of the influential 2025 Hill & Valley Forum, suggest Big Tech now is prioritizing fossil fuels for data centers over its climate commitments.

    Google and other major tech companies as recently as a few years ago led the corporate world in acknowledging the seriousness of the climate emergency and proposing concrete actions to limit Silicon Valley’s carbon emissions. Porat’s company has for years positioned itself as a climate leader in the tech industry. Among its many promises? An ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030.

    Yet Porat’s comments at the Hill & Valley Forum, and her subsequent praise in July for the Trump administration’s “energy abundance” agenda — which supports oil, gas, and coal while severely penalizing renewables such as wind and solar — signal that, at a time when climate action is under serious threat from Republicans, the country’s largest tech companies are wavering in their support for the cheapest, cleanest, and lowest-carbon energy sources.   

    That’s reflected in Google’s carbon emissions, which soared nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to a company environmental report. An independent study from the NewClimate Institute, a German nonprofit, warned in August of a “crisis” for the tech giant’s ability to meet its climate targets, stating that “data centre expansion and higher artificial intelligence (AI) usage have rapidly increased Google’s electricity demand and absolute [greenhouse gas] emissions.”

    Google didn’t respond to a media request about Porat’s comments.   

    “Climate Extremist Agenda”

    Founded in 2021, the Hill & Valley Forum is an organization that brings together prominent tech executives and venture capitalists with federal policymakers. This year’s event, which took place in late April, featured the likes of Palantir CEO Alex Carp and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, alongside politicians including Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.

    The opening remarks were delivered by Burgum, a former North Dakota governor with close ties to the fossil fuel industry. As interior secretary, Burgum oversees management and conservation of federal land. Previous reporting showed that in 2024, months prior to being nominated by Trump for the position, Burgum hosted a private dinner for oil, gas, and coal executives.  

    Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported “the climate extremist agenda,” which he defined as the idea that “a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.” Burgum added: “I’ve always been a little offended by that.”

    Echoing common climate-denier talking points about the inability of climate models to predict future temperature rise, Burgum questioned “how a group could take a spreadsheet and extrapolate [climate] data for 90 years, 80 years, now 75 years and say ‘this is absolutely what’s going to happen.’”

    He then positioned coal as an energy source that can power Big Tech’s data centers. “Any coal plant running in America today is incredibly clean,” he claimed without evidence.

    U.S. power plant pollution is at its highest levels in three years due to a recent surge in generation from coal.

    Burgum concluded by stating that accelerating production of American oil, gas, coal, and potentially some nuclear would be key to realizing Silicon Valley’s AI agenda.

    “That’s the Trump plan, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” he said.

    Google Leader On Burgum’s Vision for AI: “Fantastic”

    Porat, the Google president, expressed no qualms with Burgum’s speech when she was asked about it on a panel later that day, instead stating that his “comments were fantastic.” Porat then elaborated that Google and the Trump administration were in agreement about needing to scale up nuclear production and modernize the electrical grid.

    Five years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that “we have until 2030 to chart a sustainable cause for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change.” He outlined a plan to power its data centers by doing “things like pairing wind and solar power sources together, and increasing our use of battery storage.” 

    But at the Hill & Valley Forum, Porat outlined an energy agenda much more favorable to fossil fuels. During the panel, she touted a recent Google white paper that didn’t once mention wind or solar, even though they generally remain the cheapest form of power generation worldwide. The document instead called for federal investment in “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture (among other sources).”

    Others at the conference voiced direct skepticism of renewable energy, including David Friedberg, co-host of the popular pro-Trump tech podcast All-In. “To scale up energy, it’s not about solar, it’s not about wind, those might have been nice from a narrative perspective, but scalable energy production requires these next-gen systems and we have to unlock that,” he claimed during a panel about reindustrializing America.

    In reality, last year, nearly 93 percent of new power additions worldwide came from renewable sources.

    Trump’s AI Action Plan

    When the Trump administration unveiled its AI Action Plan in Washington, D.C., in late July, the event was presented in the form of a live podcast hosted by Friedberg and his other All-In co-hosts, as well as the founders of Hill & Valley. 

    “We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it,” the plan reads. “To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day.”

    The plan claims that it will ensure free speech in AI systems by eliminating “references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” It further constricts federal spending to developers of the type of AI models, such as ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok, “who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”

    Some climate groups were quick to condemn the proposal. “This U.S. AI Action Plan doesn’t just open the door for Big Tech and Big Oil to team up, it unhinges and removes any and all doors,” KD Chavez, executive director of the national advocacy group Climate Justice Alliance, said in a statement.

    But if Google has any concerns about the anti-climate AI policies being pursued by the White House, the company isn’t showing it. At a mid-July AI event in Pennsylvania, Porat heaped more praise on the Trump administration.

    “Mr. President, thank you for your leadership and for your clear and urgent direction that our nation invest in AI infrastructure, technology and the energy to unlock its benefits so that America can continue to lead,” she said.

    Original article by Geoff Dembicki republished from DeSmog.

    Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
    Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
    Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
    Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.

  • Protesters Target Dutch Microsoft Data Center for ‘Genocidal Collaboration’ With IDF

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    Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Activists with the group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) lock themselves to a pole near the entrance to Microsoft’s data center near Middenmeer, Netherlands on August 10, 2025 (Photo: Geef Tegengas/Instagram)

    “Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians.”

    Protesters staged a demonstration Sunday at a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands following last week’s revelation that the facility is being used by the Israel Defense Forces to plan genocidal airstrikes in Gaza and to store massive amounts of intelligence on Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories.

    Members of the direct action group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) led the demonstration at Microsoft’s data center near the northwestern city of Middenmeer. Some activists scaled the roof of a building and lit flares, while others locked themselves to poles and blocked an entrance to the facility.

    On its Instagram page, Geef Tegengas said it was targeting “genocide in our backyard.”

    https://www.instagram.com/p/DNK-5gvIIg_/

    “Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians,” the group said. “Thanks to its Azure cloud service, Microsoft plays a direct role in the genocide of the people of Gaza.”

    Geef Tegengas demanded that Microsoft “remove all Israeli intelligence data” and urged employees at the facility to “lay down your work.”

    The group also called on people to boycott Microsoft and support the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

    “We will continue to take action until this genocidal collaboration stops,” Geef Tegengas vowed.

    Sunday’s demonstration followed the publication last week of a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealing that Unit 8200, the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), is storing 11,500 terabytes of data containing roughly 200 million hours of Palestinians’ phone call recordings on the Azure servers in the Netherlands.

    According to the investigation—which involved interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources and a cache of leaked company documents—former Unit 8200 head Yossi Sariel traveled to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington in the United States in 2021 to meet CEO Satya Nadella.

    Sniffing a lucrative opportunity, Nadella agreed to grant the cyberwarfare unit access to a special area of the Azure cloud platform. The project’s goal was storing “a million calls per hour.”

    An intelligence source said that some of the Microsoft employees involved in the undertaking were Unit 8200 veterans, making collaboration “much easier.”

    One leaked Microsoft document showed that company leaders embraced the IDF partnership as “an incredibly powerful brand moment.”

    Microsoft responded to the investigation by claiming that Nadella was unaware of exactly what kind of data Unit 8200 was storing on the company’s servers.

    Three Unit 8200 sources told The Guardian that Azure has facilitated IDF airstrikes on Gaza, where 674 days of U.S.-backed IDF bombing, invasion, and siege have left at least 229,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing amid a worsening famine and the specter of ethnic cleansing and full Israeli occupation.

    Israel’s conduct in the war is the subject of an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. The International Criminal Court, also located in the Dutch city, last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.

    Microsoft said Monday that it has launched an investigation into how Unit 8200 is using Azure. This, after the company said in May that an internal review “found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and [artificial intelligence] technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”

    A Microsoft spokesperson said Monday that the company “takes these allegations seriously, as shown by our previous independent investigation.”

    “As we receive new information, we’re committed to making sure we have a chance to validate any new data and take any needed action,” the spokesperson added.

    The Guardian reported Monday that the news outlets’ investigation prompted debate last week in the Staten-Generaal, the Dutch Parliament, where Christine Teunissen of the left-wing Party for the Animals pressed the government on what it is doing to prevent data stored in the Netherlands from “being used to commit genocide” in Gaza.

    Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp replied that he would “request further investigation.”

    “If there are serious indications of criminal offenses in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated, and that is then up to the public prosecution service,” he said.

    The Guardian/+972 Magazine/Local Call investigation follows last month’s revelation by the latter two outlets that the IDF has undertaken a “dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Azure.”

    Big Tech’s profiteering from Israel’s annihilation of Gaza and occupation, settler colonization, and apartheid in the West Bank has sparked numerous protests, including by employees of complicit companies. At least dozens of workers at companies including Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been fired for Palestine advocacy. Others have resigned in protest.

    Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft software engineer, was fired after organizing an October 2024 “No Azure for Apartheid” vigil for Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

    Nasr told The Guardian after his termination that he was fired “simply because we were daring to humanize Palestinians, and simply because we were daring to say that Microsoft should not be complicit with an army that is plausibly accused of genocide.”

    Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

  • Wiz Acquisition Puts Israeli Intelligence In Charge of Your Google Data

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    Original article by Alan Macleod republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

    Google recently announced it would acquire Israeli-American cloud security firm Wiz for $32 billion. The price tag — 65 times Wiz’s annual revenue — has raised eyebrows and further solidified the close relationship between Google and the Israeli military.

    In its press release, the Silicon Valley giant claimed that the purchase will “vastly improve how security is designed, operated and automated—providing an end-to-end security platform for customers, of all types and sizes, in the AI era.”

    Yet it has also raised fears about the security of user data, particularly of those who oppose Israeli actions against its neighbors, given Unit 8200’s long history of using tech to spy on opponents, gather intelligence, and use that knowledge for extortion and blackmail.

    Israel’s Global Spy Network

    Wiz was established only five years ago, and all four co-founders — Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik — were leaders in Israel’s elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200. Like many Israeli tech companies, Wiz is a direct outgrowth of the military intelligence outfit. A recent study found that almost fifty of its current employees are Unit 8200 veterans.

    “That experience showed me the impact you can make when you combine great talent with amazing technology,” Rappaport said of his time in the military.

    Former Unit 8200 agents, working hand-in-glove with the Israeli national security state, have gone on to produce many of the world’s most infamous malware and hacking tools.

    Perhaps the most well-known of these is Pegasus, spyware used by governments around the world to surveil and harass political opponents. These include India, Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which used the tool to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.

    In total, more than 50,000 journalists, human rights defenders, diplomats, business leaders and politicians are known to have been secretly surveilled. That includes heads of state such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Iraqi President Barham Salih. All Pegasus sales had to be approved by the Israeli government, which reportedly had access to the data Pegasus’ foreign customers were accruing.

    Unit 8200 also spies on Americans. Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency regularly shared the data and communications of U.S. citizens with the Israeli intelligence group. “I think that’s amazing…It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen,” he said.

    For the Israeli government, the utility of these private spying firms filled with former IDF intelligence figures is that it allows it some measure of plausible deniability when confronted with spying attacks. As Haaretz explained: “Who owns [these spying companies] isn’t clear, but their employees aren’t soldiers. Consequently, they may solve the army’s problem, even if the solution they provide is imperfect.”

    Today, former Unit 8200 agents not only create much of the world’s spyware, but also the security features that claim to protect against unwanted surveillance. A MintPress investigation found that three of the six largest VPN companies in the world are owned and controlled by an Israeli company co-founded by a Unit 8200 veteran.

    Exposed: How Israeli Spies Control Your VPN

    How Unit 8200 Controls Palestinians

    It is in Palestine, however, that Unit 8200 has been most active. The unit serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s hi-tech repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through facial recognition cameras, monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a digital dragnet that it uses to snoop on, harass, and suppress Palestinians.

    It compiles dossiers on virtually every Gaza resident, including their medical history, sex lives, and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel.

    One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen for them in phone conversations he was eavesdropping on.

    Unit 8200 is also reportedly behind the even more controversial Project Lavender, a giant, AI-generated kill list of tens of thousands of Gazans that the IDF uses to target the densely populated strip’s civilian population.

    Palestanian workers cross the Eyal checkpoint into Israel under the watchful eye of IDF cameras, January 10, 2021. Keren Manor | Activestills

    Every Gazan (including children) is assigned a score of 1-100, based on their perceived proximity to Hamas. A wide range of characteristics will increase an individual’s score, including living or working in the same building or being in a WhatsApp group with a known or suspected Hamas member.

    If a person’s number reaches a certain threshold, they are automatically added to a Unit 8200 kill list. This, one IDF commander explained, solved Israel’s perennial targeting “human bottleneck,” allowing them to carry out tens of thousands of strikes into Gaza during the first few weeks of the post-October 7 attack alone.

    Unit 8200 is also widely reported to have carried out the Lebanon Pager Attack, exploding thousands of electronic devices at the same time, killing dozens and injuring thousands more. The operation was widely described, even by former CIA director Leon Panetta, as an act of terrorism.

    This long history of violence, skulduggery, and spying raises troubling questions about whether a corporation founded and staffed by dozens of individuals from such an organization can be trusted with billions of users’ private and personal data.

    Google’s Ties to Israeli Intelligence

    Google’s purchase of Wiz deepens its already close ties to Unit 8200. In 2013, the tech giant acquired Waze, an online maps service founded by three Unit 8200 veterans, for $1.3 billion. It has also directly hired dozens of former spooks and spies to fill its ranks; a 2022 MintPress News investigation found at least 99 former Unit 8200 agents working at the Silicon Valley behemoth.

    Among these figures is Gavriel Goidel, Head of Strategy and Operations for Google Research. Goidel joined Google in 2022 after a six-year career in military intelligence, during which he rose to become Head of Learning at Unit 8200. There, he led a large team of operatives who sifted through intelligence data to “understand patterns of hostile activists,” according to his own account.

    Google is far from an outlier when it comes to hiring former Israeli spies to carry out its operations. Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have all hired a significant number of ex-Unit 8200 agents. Even TikTok, supposedly a hotbed of anti-Semitism, employs a considerable number of ex-spooks. Perhaps most surprisingly, a number of top U.S. media outlets, including CNN and Axios, have recruited former Unit 8200 spies and analysts to write and produce America’s news about the Middle East.

    Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News

    Google has invested heavily in Israel, first opening offices there in 2006. Longtime CEO Eric Schmidt is known to be a vocal supporter of the controversial state. In a 2012 meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he declared that “the decision to invest in Israel was one of the best that Google has ever made.”

    But the Wiz deal is undoubtedly the company’s biggest Israeli investment yet. The all-cash acquisition represents a massive injection of money into Israel’s flailing and war-weary economy, equivalent to 0.6% of the country’s GDP. The money, the Israeli press excitedly reports, will allow the government to continue without enacting major austerity measures, reduce the nation’s deficit, and enable Israel to continue on a wartime footing for longer. As such, it represents a move critics say amounts to a financial intervention on behalf of Israel. Moreover, it also sends a message to the rest of the business world to invest in the country, boosting investor sentiment at a time when it is most needed.

    The size of the deal also surprised many. The price is similar to that of the sale of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo in 2008, Visa Europe in 2017, and Twitter in 2022. Yet Wiz is a new and relatively unknown company, raising questions about its valuation.

    Ultimately, though, these considerations are secondary to the main issue that such a group will now be charged with providing security for the data of billions of users worldwide. Given Unit 8200’s role in monitoring and targeting the Palestinian population, many will be wondering if, going forward, Google products are at all safe to use.

    Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

    Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

    Original article by Alan Macleod republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

  • German ministry dismisses lawyer for supporting Gaza, rejecting genocide

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    This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

    Thousands of people carrying Palestinian flags and banners march as they protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Germany’s arms support to Israel in Unter den Linden Street, Berlin, Germany on April 13, 2024 [Halil Sagirkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images]

    The German federal ministry has dismissed a lawyer in Berlin due to her opposition to the Israeli assault on Gaza, the Palestinian Information Centre reported.

    On Saturday lawyer Melanie Schweizer posted a video on X stating: “Yesterday I got fired as a civil servant working at the Federal Ministry in Germany. Why? In a nutshell because I was speaking out against the genocide in Palestine committed by Israel, against the German support thereof, against the violence and crimes happening there.” Highlighting the German government and police’s efforts to silence pro-Palestine voices, she added: “This is where we’re at in Germany. This is a blatant attack on our constitutional rights to freedom.”

    She called on supporters of Gaza to make their stance clear and “keep speaking up, keep using your voice, losing your job is not the worst that can happen to you, losing your life is. Losing your freedom right is.”

    Many European and American companies have previously dismissed employees over their stance on the war on Gaza and their opposition to genocide.

    In October 2024, Microsoft dismissed two employees after they organised a sit-in at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., in solidarity with the victims of the Israeli assault on Gaza.

    On 22 January, the Washington Post reported that Google had dismissed more than 50 employees last year after they protested against the “Nimbus” contract, citing concerns that the technology could support military and intelligence programmes used by the Israeli occupation army in its war on Palestinians in Gaza.

    In September 2024, the Noguchi Museum in New York announced the dismissal of three employees for allegedly violating the dress code by wearing keffiyehs, which have become a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

    READ: Protesters show their opposition to Germany’s pro-Israel bias

    This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

    Experiencing issues with this image not appearing. I suspect because it's so critical of Zionist Keir Starmer's support of and complicity in Israel's genocides.
    Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA

  • Probes Reveal Depth of Big Tech Complicity in Israel’s AI-Driven Gaza Slaughter

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    Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    An aerial view shows Palestinians walking through the ruins of destroyed buildings in the Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, on February 5, 2025.
     (Photo: Khalil Ramzi Alkahlut/Anadolu via Getty Images

    “Many nations are looking to Israel and its use of AI in Gaza with admiration and jealousy,” said one expert. “Expect to see a form of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon-backed AI in other war zones soon.”

    Several recent journalistic investigations—including one published Tuesday by The Associated Press—have deepened the understanding of how Israeli forces are using artificial intelligence and cloud computing systems sold by U.S. tech titans for the mass surveillance and killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

    The AP‘s Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick, and Garance Burke found that Israel’s use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology “skyrocketed” following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

    “This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare,” Heidy Khlaaf, chief artificial intelligence scientist at the AI Now Institute and a former senior safety engineer at OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, told the AP. “The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward.”

    As Biesecker, Mednick, and Burke noted:

    Israel’s goal after the attack that killed about 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages was to eradicate Hamas, and its military has called AI a “game changer” in yielding targets more swiftly. Since the war started, more than 50,000 people have died in Gaza and Lebanon and nearly 70% of the buildings in Gaza have been devastated, according to health ministries in Gaza and Lebanon.

    According to the AP report, Israel buys advanced AI models from OpenAI and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. While OpenAI said it has no partnership with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in early 2024 the company quietly removed language from its usage policy that prohibited military use of its technology.

    The AP reporters also found that Google and Amazon provide cloud computing and AI services to the IDF via Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021. Furthermore, the IDF uses Cisco and Dell server farms or data centers. Red Hat, an independent IBM subsidiary, sells cloud computing services to the IDF. Microsoft partner Palantir Technologies also has a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s military.

    Google told the AP that the company is committed to creating AI “that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”

    However, Google recently removed from its Responsible AI principles a commitment to not use AI for the development of technology that could cause “overall harm,” including weapons and surveillance.

    The AP investigation follows a Washington Post probe published last month detailing how Google has been “directly assisting” the IDF and Israel’s Ministry of Defense “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 dozens of workers following their participation in “No Tech for Apartheid” protests against the use of the company’s products and services by forces accused of genocide in Gaza.

    “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,” wrote Gerrit De Vynck, author of the Post report.

    “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,” De Vynck added. “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.”

    Previous investigations have detailed how the IDF also uses Habsora, an Israeli AI system that can automatically select airstrike targets at an exponentially faster rate than ever before.

    “In the past, there were times in Gaza when we would create 50 targets per year. And here the machine produced 100 targets in one day,” former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi told Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine, a joint Israeli-Palestinian publication, in 2023. Another intelligence source said that Habsora has transformed the IDF into a “mass assassination factory” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills.

    Compounding the crisis, in the heated hours following the October 7 attack, mid-ranking IDF officers were empowered to order attacks on not only senior Hamas commanders but any fighter in the resistance group, no matter how junior. What’s more, the officers were allowed to risk up to 20 civilian lives in each strike, and up to 500 noncombatant lives per day. Days later, that limit was lifted. Officers could order any number of strikes as they believed were legal, with no limits on civilian harm.

    Senior IDF commanders sometimes approved strikes they knew could kill more than 100 civilians if the target was deemed important enough. In one AI-aided airstrike targeting one senior Hamas commander, the IDF dropped multiple U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bombs, which can level an entire city block, on the Jabalia refugee camp in October 2023. According to the U.K.-based airstrike monitor Airwars, the bombing killed at least 126 people, 68 of them children, and wounded 280 others. Hamas’ Qassam Brigades said four Israeli and three international hostages were also killed in the attack.

    Then there’s the mass surveillance element. Independent journalist Antony Loewenstein recently wrote for Middle East Eye that “corporate behemoths are storing massive amounts of information about every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and elsewhere.”

    “How this data will be used, in a time of war and mass surveillance, is obvious,” Loewenstein continued. “Israel is building a huge database, Chinese-state style, on every Palestinian under occupation: what they do, where they go, who they see, what they like, what they want, what they fear, and what they post online.”

    “Palestinians are guinea pigs—but this ideology and work doesn’t stay in Palestine,” he said. “Silicon Valley has taken note, and the new Trump era is heralding an ever-tighter alliance among Big Tech, Israel, and the defense sector. There’s money to be made, as AI currently operates in a regulation-free zone globally.”

    “Think about how many other states, both democratic and dictatorial, would love to have such extensive information about every citizen, making it far easier to target critics, dissidents, and opponents,” Loewenstein added. “With the far right on the march globally—from Austria to Sweden, France to Germany, and the U.S. to Britain—Israel’s ethno-nationalist model is seen as attractive and worth mimicking.

    Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).