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Google also has employees in different countries.

Would you be okay if your AI works as American ends up in the hands of the Russian military?

Why should a German, or French, or Russian Google employee then accept that their work ends up in the hands of the US military?

EDIT: Yes, they won’t directly work on the drone program – but the drone program will more likely than not be reusing ML technology built all across Google, and everyone that worked on that now knows they are personally helping the US military-industrial complex.



You must not know how these things work. If they are working with the DOD they are probably American citizens on American soil. Especially if anything is classified, I’d put money AI is.

There was a video of Elon Musk talking about how they can only hire Citizens at SpaceX due to government restrictions. Same concept would apply to Google and DOD Work.


> You must not know how these things work. If they are working with the DOD they are probably American citizens on American soil. Especially if anything is classified, I’d put money AI is.

Directly? No. But the Google employees working on ReCaptcha know their work on training object recognition models will help the US military, and the ReCaptcha people aren’t only US citizen.


ITAR Rules for rocketry technology is absolutely not the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...


I’m a web dev and looked at federal jobs that required a citizenship at minimum and at max a clearance with polygraphs.

Nothing in my line of work comes close to ITAR, just business process automation. I’ll put money anything with AI and DOD in the job description will require polygraphs, background interviews, citizenship etc.


Imagine if Russian Google workers are making something for US military? I'm pretty sure it would be considered treason under Russian laws.


Indeed it does. Google tried to flirt with the regime back a decade ago and be say at minimum "too conciliatory" with them. Now what came out of that?

After they did few token delisting of opposition websites, Russian three letter service felt they finally snapped, and that they can have their own way with them.

They had to evacuate their most valuable cadres out of there to Switzerland, by giving Swiss canton an eye watering sum for a carte-blanche from their immigration office to resettle former Russian office staff there.

Armed men in black now frequent their office on Balchug. Now, with suitcases stuffed with god knows what on them.


I believe that the way Government contracts work does not allow non-citizens (perhaps non-residents?) to work on them.

(at least directly)


Citizen, background checks, and for DoD, secret accreditation. So the chance of a Russian employee working on a DoD project are non-existent.


You know, MDA had non-citizens working on American spy sats for quite some time... Just look at their linkedins. I don't think a man who graduated Peking university on a full time program, can become a Canadian/US citizen the next year, when he joined MDA.

Quite a lot of those guys are on work permits in Canada.




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