Silicon Valley entrepreneur and President Trump ally Peter Thiel is berating Google again over its work on artificial intelligence in China, which he warns may benefit the country’s armed forces.
“A.I. is a military technology,” Thiel wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. “Forget the sci-fi fantasy; what is powerful about actually existing A.I. is its application to relatively mundane tasks like computer vision and data analysis.”
Artificial intelligence tools, he added, are “valuable to any army — to gain an intelligence advantage, for example, or to penetrate defenses in a relatively new theater of cyberwarfare, where we are already amid the equivalent of a multinational shooting war.”
Thiel, who founded data analytics firm Palantir, said artificial intelligence’s military applications make Google’s recent decisions “shocking.” The company, for example, announced in 2017 that it would open a center devoted to artificial intelligence in China and said a year later that it wouldn’t renew a Pentagon contract for artificial intelligence work.
“A little curiosity about China would have gone a long way, since the Communist Party is not shy about declaring its commitment to domination in general and exploitation of technology in particular,” Thiel wrote in the New York Times. “Of course, any American who pays attention and questions the Communist line is accused by the party of having a ‘Cold War mentality’ — but this very accusation relies on forgetfulness and incuriosity among its intended audience.”
An early investor in Facebook and a member of its board of directors, Thiel went on to call Google “naive” for ending its Pentagon contract, which followed backlash from its workforce, and opening its Beijing lab.
“How can Google use the rhetoric of ‘borderless’ benefits to justify working with the country whose ‘Great Firewall‘ has imposed a border on the Internet itself?” he questioned. “This way of thinking works only inside Google’s cosseted Northern California campus, quite distinct from the world outside. The Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called ‘cosmopolitanism’ is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places.”
Thiel has trained his sights on Google in recent weeks and last month called for the CIA and the FBI to investigate whether the tech giant has been infiltrated by Chinese intelligence. He also said at the time the company is “seemingly treasonous” for its decision to work with the Chinese military instead of the U.S.
Google executive Karan Bhatia denied accusations that the company had been compromised by the Chinese government.
Thiel’s op-ed slamming Google for its work in China comes after Trump escalated his trade war with Beijing this week by imposing a 10% tariff on $300 billion in Chinese goods beginning Sept. 1.
