Google workers speak out on Project Nimbus

November 6, 2023. Today was my first day back at Google after maternity leave. I cuddled my baby daughter, Soraya, close and kissed her goodbye and shed a few goodbye tears. As I pulled up to the gleaming, huge campus in Mountain View, I was reminded of what a beacon of success and wealth that Google has been for the last 25 years. Working here had always been a dream of mine; as a child of South Asian immigrants, I had been raised to reach for the very top of American corporate prestige.
But as I entered the building and swiped my badge I suddenly felt nauseated thinking about how there are winners and losers in this game, and how ‘living the dream’ at Google has come at the expense of others, like the Palestinians in Gaza.
Through Project Nimbus, Google is providing technology that is fueling the first AI powered genocide.
According to the Nation, Project Nimbus will increase the IDF’s competence in artificial intelligence technologies, such as those deployed in the repression of Palestinian activists, surveillance along the Gaza border, and Israel’s Iron Dome system, and be used by the Israel Land Authority to advance Jewish settlements while pushing Palestinians into denser areas.
Even an Israeli government press release explicitly says it is under IDF leadership, and Google was explicitly chosen over Oracle by the IDF due to its ability to meet the big data analysis, AI, and ML requirements for the military.
As a mother at Google, it makes me absolutely sick to think that our technology is endangering an innocent Palestinian child.
That November morning that I kissed Soraya goodbye, I got to come back home to her, just in time to hold her and read our bedtime books. But if I was a mother in Gaza, I could not be afforded such a privilege.
Because every 10 minutes, a mother in Gaza has her child murdered by Israeli bombs. We have now passed 9,077 murdered babies and children by Israel. For the last 2 months my heart has been breaking on a daily basis. Bomb after bomb after bomb. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. 💔💔💔.
Yesterday, I watched a mom say goodbye to her newborn baby boy who was killed in a bombing while he was being breastfed - what was his crime?
I came to this company to do good and change the world. And I still believe that is possible - but we must make better choices. Is a $1.2B contract worth it? Or will we put the lives of 2M Gazans ahead of the profits?
Every 10 minutes a child is murdered in Gaza. This mother says, "Not on our watch Google"

I find it difficult to believe that we uphold our values when one of our products is directly involved in arming an army that is currently being charged for committing genocide and numerous war crimes. Furthermore, I don’t feel safe to voice my concerns within Google as I fear of being retaliated against.

When I joined Google almost 20 years ago I believed in Google's mission to organize the worlds’ information.
I did not sign up to have my labour used towards the first AI-powered genocide.
I work on Accessibility User Experience and as such have a responsibility to the disabled people who use Google’s products.
How can we tell disabled users that we will make technology more accessible for them whilst our technology is also being used to slaughter, injure and disable tens of thousands of people in Palestine?
Google must drop Project Nimbus and stop profiting from genocide and apartheid.
Free Palestine.

From day one when I joined Google, Google preached its motto -- "don't be evil". Yet, it works with the Israeli government, who's been recognized as an apartheid state by various world's leading human rights organizations for its ongoing human right abuses against the Palestinians. It really doesn't take much to find that fact using its own search engine.

It's extremely demoralizing to work here knowing that Google supports the ongoing brutal oppression of the Palestinian people by providing direct technological support to the apartheid state just for a few billion dollars (Project Nimbus). The double standard is blatantly glaring when you consider that Google's stance on other issues, i.e. it has long refused to provide service in China for the country's strict censorship rules.

Not only does Google directly support Israel, it has not made any statements acknowledging the atrocities committed by the apartheid state against the palestinians, against backdrop where
1. Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank, most of whom innocent women and children. In addition, many thousands more have lost their limbs, and millions are starving and no access to clean water.
2. Israel is being tried at the international court of justice for committing genocide right now. Other case about it's illegal occupation is also being submitted to the ICJ.
3. It has retaliated against employees that spoke out against project nimbus, and creating a hostile environment for that.

Through Project Nimbus, It is clear to me that Google values money over people's lives. It has stayed far away from "don't be evil" for corporate greed.

I joined Google over other tech companies because of Google’s values - to make information available and accessible for all, to improve peoples’ lives. Project Nimbus blatantly spits in the face of these self-proclaimed values, its commitment to "significantly improving the lives of as many people as possible." Instead, Project Nimbus is providing technology to an apartheid state that is actively under investigation for war crimes and genocidal intent. Meanwhile, Google leadership's response to workers' drop Nimbus demands (retaliating against organizers, silencing workers that speak up against Nimbus on corp, in particular Arab and Muslim workers) has shown that Google leadership only values their own commitments and workers' demands insofar as it doesn't hurt Google profit. Google's brash disregard for human lives, Google's willingness to support a genocide will not be forgotten to the tides of history. It will not be forgotten by the workers and the users alienated by Google's actions. I am not proud to work for Google. I am ashamed to work for Google, and the ONLY reason I am still working for Google is because of my fellow workers at No Tech for Apartheid organizing against Nimbus, and against tech complicit in genocide.

Everyday, I go to work filled with such disgust, dread, and disappointment at Google’s complicity and profit from the AI-powered genocide of the Palestinian people by the "Israeli" settler state. How can anyone get anything done, continue working normally, as the world watches live the graphic atrocities of ethnic cleansing? There is not a single day that my soul does not weigh heavy with grief. It deeply troubles me how little Google cares for the lives of Palestinians, and the great lengths they go to in their determination to silence worker dissent. I myself have been silenced in internal question forums and reprimanded for "misuse" of work channels in expressing solidarity with Palestine. Apparently speaking about the genocide is not relevant to the workplace… as if Google Cloud AI tools aren’t being used by the genocidal "Israeli" occupiers! If Google is not the space to discuss the use and impact of our technology, then where the fuck is the right space? Tech workers have the right to know how their labor is being used — and to exercise agency in demanding their labor not be used in violently oppressive ways.

It is impossible to feel excited and energized to work when you know your company is providing the Israeli government products that are helping it commit atrocities in Palestine. I work on Google Nest, and it feels disingenuous to be working to create a Smart Home that takes care of the people in it, when Project Nimbus is helping Israel destroy the homes of Palestinians, and take their lives.

As a member of a team within Google Cloud, I cannot be sure whether my work is helping facilitate military attacks that are hurting members of my community via its use in Project Nimbus. I am unable to adhere to my own ethical standard as an engineer, nor to Google’s "values," such as respecting the user and respecting each other. I find that there is no pathway for accountability given the classified nature of the project. When this is coupled with the fact that the project is used by the Israeli defense establishment, there is no way for me to know whether our work is being used unethically.

Every day, it makes me uncomfortable to work at a company with leadership that excitedly approved of Project Nimbus and its partnership with Israel.

The obsession with AI at Google feels deeply unsettling. All this talk about its power, and zero acknowledgement of its darkside. As someone of Pakistani and Afghan descent, I’m familiar with how the U.S. government used drone technology to murder innocent kids and families in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Kids like Tariq Aziz. I think about the drone operator sitting in a cushy chair out of Nevada. Killing from a distance.

Knowing cloud technology has an AI component, I worry as a Google worker how Google might be complicit in supporting the disgusting and inhumane genocide of Palestinians by Israel. How will its AI Cloud technology be used to continue the subjugation of Palestinians? Are there AI Sales Representatives from Google going to Israel to speak about how they can continue treating Palestinians like animals? Will Google’s products be used by the Israeli government as a backbone to building horrific AI technology like The Gospel? Or are they purely focused on the dollar signs?

Google, don’t continue to be on the wrong side of history. Your own workers like me and many others are asking you not to.

Palestine zindabad, long live Palestinian resistance <3

Google's direct perpetuation of Israeli settler colonialism, surveillance, automated apartheid, and genocide has made it impossible for me as a supposed champion of responsible AI for good to believe in the actual value of my work. I've been told bringing up the current Palestinian genocide does not align with my team's objectives; it feels like everyone at Google is willfully trying to ignore current crimes against humanity — but for what? At what cost — our own humanity?

The level of worker suppression that is both shared internally and publicly available has engendered in me a level of cognitive dissonance that has me feeling disconnected from my team and the company's mission. Google's hypocrisy — and prioritization of profit over actual people's lives — needs to end.

Project Nimbus and the unwillingness of Google and Amazon to divest from it is a wake-up call for everyone in tech.

For a long time, the tech industry in the US has claimed to be apolitical while not shying away from working with militaries around the world, aiding surveillance, not doing enough to protect user data, and aligning with oppressive governments. Those of us who come from other parts of the world see the disregard with which tech companies in the US operate especially when it comes to black and brown people around the world. Even within the companies, voices that try to point out this disparity face targeting, harassment, retaliation, and termination. As tech workers with access to unimaginable amount of data and computational power, we cannot stay silent. We see how AI systems are being used to kill people in Palestine, how Facebook aided the genocide in Myanmar, the role of tech in the rise of Islamophobia in India, and plenty of other instances. Tech executives are increasingly unwilling to listen to workers even when it's clear that this culture is affecting workplace conditions and making us culpable for large scale violence and genocide. I used to be a tech worker who had bought into the myth of meritocracy and neutrality of tech companies, but the reality is very different. It is time for us make our voice heard as workers and disrupt the status quo.

I want to be able to sleep at night.

Working for GCP is amazing with the scale of impact I can have. I can improve everything from cancer research, online shopping to music applications all with a single cl. That scale of impact is sometimes awe-inspiring.

But when we court contracts that put my work in the kill chain it feels much less noble.

Let's stop being Evil.

Trying to carry on at work while organizing against Project Nimbus and watching a genocide unfold before my eyes has been the most stressful period of my entire life. It's affected my health and my relationships. I worry a lot about how it will affect my future. I cannot imagine how my Palestinian peers have carried on through all of this.

I could have just quit, but Google's leadership clearly won't take their ethical obligations seriously on their own, and our government is complicit; there's no other option but for workers to speak up.

I don't just want Google to drop Nimbus, I want them to drop every contract. It is fundamentally unethical for a global company to take military contracts, because no matter which military the contract is with or what exactly the contract entails, there will always be people on the receiving end.

I think all workers in tech companies should have a say in selling controversial technology. As a worker of conscience, I do not think that we should be enabling surveillance and supporting the military, especially one which threatens the livelihoods of millions of people. Unfortunately, because of how lucrative these multi million dollar contracts are, companies are incentivized to keep workers in the dark in how the technology will be used. This lack of transparency is concerning as contracts like Project Nimbus will be swept under the rug while countless people suffer.

How can we continue to work with a government which is committing and being investigated for the crime of genocide? How can our company expect us workers to sit quietly while our innovation is being traded away for militarism and empire? Project Nimbus must end.

It’s been difficult carrying out my day to day work knowing the company I work for is directly facilitating the genocide in Gaza. It’s impossible to deny what is happening there. Everyday I wake up to new footage on social media of atrocities committed against the Palestinian people.

It’s especially upsetting seeing leadership downplay the role our technology plays — saying it’s not used by the military — when there is direct evidence indicating the opposite.

I am compelled to speak out and I demand an immediate end to this contract.

As a cloud software engineer, it has been extremely difficult to continue to be motivated at work knowing that, due to project Nimbus, my labor/code/software can be potentially used for killing Palestinians or subjecting them to a lifetime of surveillance which facilitates their oppression and ethnic cleansing by Israel.

I can't reconcile contributing to technology that can be used for human rights violations, let alone a large scale genocide that has killed 13,000 Palestinian children in Gaza in 6 months.

I'd immediately withhold my labor and stop working on such technology if it becomes clear it is directly used for the killing/surveillance of Palestinians.

I identify as Jewish, I was raised in a Jewish household and was Bat Mitzvah’d. The genocide and control of Palestinians by the Israeli government is the opposite of all the morals and values I learned from Judaism. We’ve been prosecuted so many times, why would we turn around and do this to others? Google’s participation in this horrific violence through Project Nimbus makes me ashamed to work for the company.

The weaponization of "anti-semitism" as a tool to justify the genocide in Palestine *almost* makes me ashamed to be Jewish too. But Im not ashamed of my Judaism, because Judaism taught me to speak up on behalf of marginalized folks who aren’t being heard in the ways they deserve. It taught me to fight against injustice and to fight for what’s right. And that’s why I’m against Project Nimbus.

As someone that works at YouTuber, I wonder how much misinformation on Project Nimbus is shared by the algorithm. The very same algorithm that boost Zionist content and shadow bans Palestinian content, like any other big tech algorithm. What big tech doesn’t know, is that they are not shit with the people or what they call "users" and the people are slowly waking up by the masses- this is only the beginning.

I find it disgusting that a company would write software for the state of Israel which is systematically killing civilians and children, specifically software that makes that killing more efficient and widespread. I don’t know what else to say. It breaks my heart and my brain that this could continue. Out of words

Project Nimbus disturbs me deeply. I feel alienated from my work and guilty of being an employee of Google. I have spoken to many employees who are too scared to express their discomfort with Project Nimbus. Many Googlers are psychologically distressed that they could enable the potential abuse of human rights. It would greatly serve Google to abandon contracts that divide the workplace and do not live up to the standard of "Don’t be evil".

When I joined Google, its motto was "don't be evil." This was a critical part of my working conditions: I don't write software to hurt people.

Using the labor of myself and my coworkers to assist genocide is evil. It's hard to keep working when every day I have to grapple with that ethical question. Every day I have to face questions from my friends and peers about why I'm participating in a company doing this.

My name is Noor and I’m Egyptian-American. I’m also a data scientist at Google. As tech workers, the most important responsibility we have is to ensure the ethical use of our technology and hold our leadership accountable to the highest standards.

I am increasingly distraught, demoralized, and disillusioned with working at Google after leadership has avoided any meaningful answers about how my labor could be used by the Israeli government and military through Project Nimbus, and has instead retaliated against those workers who speak up and demand answers. It directly impacts mine and my coworkers mental health and well-being as workers who could be implicated in Israel's actions, which the ICJ has described as a plausible genocide.

I joined Google eight and a half years ago, to work on a team surfacing hurricane and other disaster alerts, hoping some of those would save lives. It's a sad book-end to my career that Google AI, possibly including some of my own work, is [most likely] being used to intentionally kill people.

I was a teenager around the time of the Iraq War, and I remember how people in power lied and lied, told us that our biggest threat was Saddam Hussein, Iraq, brown people in general. It became clear our leaders mostly wanted to profit from oil, and the instability and desperation that they brought. The way I see it, 9/11 was an opportunity to them. I see parallels with the current genocide in Gaza, where some Israeli politicians have made it clear they want the land, and don't plan on withdrawing troops for any reason.

The recent +972 report on Lavender and "Where's Daddy?" highlights the use of machine learning to automate killing people. As someone who's followed the military contracting at this company, part of my reaction is like "damn, yeah"; this is a bit further along, but not super different than previous contracts with the US military. These systems which uses AI to rank people, detect when they're home, and bomb them with drones.

But at some point, the excuses we've built up for ourselves, for dismissing this violence, or our role in it, start to break down. "Someone else would just do it" -- Google is a leader in AI, and if/when the IDF uses Google Cloud's Vertex AI, it will be doing so for a reason. "They're just using AI as an excuse" -- even if a primary purpose of generative AI ends up being whitewashing colonization, by saying they're targeting Hamas, and any "mistakes" are the AI's fault, it's still bad. "But I'm working on an open-source project" -- every news story about a hospital or refugee camp being bombed--now loudly and proudly--means I want no part of this.

Even though I will almost certainly be leaving the company, I do still believe in collective action. So I'm here showing up with coworkers to oppose the genocide and Google's involvement in it. In particular, Project Nimbus provides the Israeli military and government with $1.2 billion in cloud resources, and recently smaller contracts. Now is the time to pressure our employer to drop the contracts, to stop being complicit in genocide, and oppression of the Palestinian people.

Project Nimbus has allowed the Israeli government to perpetrate a crime which I was taught should never happen again, genocide. My Opa and his family fled from Germany as a Jew in the 1930s and to think my employer is contributing towards putting Palestinians in the same situation as my ancestors were makes me feel sick.

I've never been more ashamed to say I work at Google as a cloud engineer in AI. I know how inaccurate these AI models can still be, and to think that we now provide those services to the IDF to aid in targeting my friends and family in Palestine fills me with dread and disgust. Everyday, I'm checking on them to see if they are still alive as they face brutal occupation and constant military bombardment. This technology will unjustly shift the blame of killing from the person pressing the trigger to the underlying AI models that have not been built for this purpose or this responsibility. The +972 article on Lavender AI proves this point exactly. This is not a world I ever want to live in, let alone support through my work.

When job searching in 2022, I was proud to say that I was putting in the extra effort to only apply to roles outside of department of defense or government intelligence contracting agencies - dodging recruiters from corporations like Lockheed Martin, or Palantir. and when I received my full-time Google offer I felt I was spared from the engineering-to-military-industrial pipeline.
It's safe to say any rose-colored lenses I had on as a new-hire were quickly smashed into pieces. Immediately after my start-date I saw how Google ignored and retaliated against workers who demanded an end to contracts with israel. And how Google continued to do so even after its apartheid-state-sponsor escalated its ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinian people, in the form of the most transparent genocide to date.
As an engineer hired to deliver Google Cloud products, I am unable to turn my eyes away from the use cases of my labor: Flattened blocks and blocks of neighborhoods, unidentified limbs scattered and split, siblings carrying their little brothers remains in schoolbags, fathers kidnapped from their families without warning, storms and storms of missiles raining down on densely populated refugee camps, makeshift tent cities bordering a polluted coast. All by the hands of the apartheid state of israel.
Since last October I struggle to make it to the office without a guise of exhaustion. I lose heart in any conversation with fellow coworkers, where any of my grief for Gaza is steered clear of. I am harassed in the office for voicing workplace concerns, and have to add dealing with a slow moving cases with HR on top of my already heavy plate. I have distanced from any 15, 10, or 5 year plans that boast influential career paths, measured by returned mass-destruction on investment. The world ahead of me has turned upside down. What was supposed to be a clear-cut simple path that I was so lucky to have earned this early in my career, has become ashy gray.
Other tech workers tell me to look away. Why should we? As israel targets institutions like Gaza Sky Geeks - a program backed by Google, AWS, Salesforce, and Stripe - in their bombing campaign, how can us tech workers look away and then stand to hear any hypocritical conversations of DEI "wins" in the workplace?
Shallow DEI initiatives, and censored Women-in-tech conventions provide little to no security to myself as a young brown Muslim woman. Instead, the most welcoming community at Google yet has been the hundreds of other workers who share the same distaste in response to contracts like project Nimbus. Our will to make our own sacrifices, and vocally confront the dissonance between Google's values and Google's contracts gives me hope that we are architecting a future where genocide and apartheid will forever be unprofitable.

Google and Amazon must drop Project Nimbus immediately and any work with the IDF, the Israeli government, and the US military/Department of Defense. Over 35,000 deaths and 6 months later, it should be clear by now that Israel is using AI technology to commit genocide, through AI-powered missile targeting systems "Hasbara" and "Lavender" as well as their surveillance systems unethically tracking Palestinians, violating their privacy en masse and upholding an apartheid society. Examples presented to the International Court of Justice in South Africa's genocide case against Israel include: multiple sitting Israeli government officials openly and explicitly calling for the eradication of Palestinian civilians and children on live TV, the "indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza (as described verbatim by US government officials), and the violent treatment and torture of Palestinian civilians and political hostages in concentration camps and prisons in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and beyond -- all across the Palestinian diaspora beyond just Gaza. As a tech worker, I cannot in good conscience support working for a company involved with this project.

It is deeply insulting to me and my colleagues at Google that the company would hypocritically go against its own values by taking on such an insidious contract like Project Nimbus. Not only that, but I am disgusted at the retaliatory and illegal discrimination and firings made over the past few months against my fellow tech workers voicing their concerns over Nimbus, with No Tech for Apartheid. This history of pro-Israel internal politics creates a hostile and unsafe environment where a state of censorship and psychological danger is at an all-time high during a genocide.

We need to support Palestinians because we as a company support humanity. Google's mission is to organize the world's information in order to help billions of users worldwide, and Google's impact in society has been so profound that it only makes sense to continue developing human-first products to push society forwards, not backwards, by contributing to a genocide and the destruction of a nation and murder of its civilians and children. It is this company's life-changing work and helpful products which drew me since I was a child to work at such a prestigious company. And Project Nimbus stands in deep contradiction to everything Google has built over the past 25 years.

We need to support Palestinians because it is the right thing to do -- in response to certain viewpoints that dismiss pro-Palestinian advocacy as inherently antisemitic, it's crucial to differentiate between criticism of specific political actions and broad-brush characterizations of any cultural or religious group. This campaign in no way targets Jewish people as a religious group, but only the fascist, Zionist population and government in Israel (Zionism being a historically extremist, right-wing political ideology, created by an atheist, and denounced by Jewish community leaders worldwide for over 100 years).

I strongly urge Google to drop Project Nimbus entirely and any other projects working with Israel or the military industrial complex at large, and Google should advocate for initiatives that better align with our company's commitment to human rights and ethical technology use. It's imperative to reassess our involvement with government bodies when our products may perpetuate conflict, injustice, or genocide. End the occupation. Ceasefire now. No tech for apartheid!

As a Palestinian Googler, I am connected to people who were killed or whose loved ones have been killed in Israeli attacks on civilians. I'm deeply distressed about Google providing technology to the Israeli government, including Google Images which is used for "target identification", with most targets ending up being civilians accroding to confessions by IDF staff. I wish Google would do the right thing and pull out of project Nimbus and restrict the use of Google technologies by the Israeli government now that we know that they are being used to kill civilians.

I'm disgusted at the fact that my work has a very high probability of being used to commit genocide right now. Sometimes I try to block it in my mind because I just don't wanna think about it. My productivity has been at an absolute minimum because of this, I just can't bring myself to do work. If Google cares about it's bottom line, it needs to drop this contract.

Learning about Project Nimbus and the retaliation against workers that spoke up against it killed the enthusiasm I had for my new job.

The weight of knowing that my labor can contribute to the oppression of Palestinians through Project Nimbus and Google's contracts with Israel regularly fills me with a profound sense of shame and outrage, particularly amidst Israel's ongoing AI-powered genocide. This understanding deeply undermines any sense of long-term investment I have in the company outside of access to healthcare or similar.

Adding to the burden, as a Muslim and disabled person, I have keenly felt and explicitly experienced a glaring absence of institutional support in cultivating a positive and inclusive work environment for others like me, especially colleagues who are Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Jewish. Furthermore, the suppression of and retaliation against workers who have reasonably expressed concerns about their work enabling violence or injustice against Palestinians—a job most of us did not join Google for—has been deeply disturbing. If asked, I would not be able to, in good conscience, recommend Google as a place to work to anyone with a conscience.

Despite Google's claims of caring about disability inclusion and responsible AI, the reality feels like a sham. There was a time when Google was able to convince me to move to a new city because I wanted to help realize Android’s goals of being "for everyone," but Project Nimbus and Google's decision to prioritize profit over principles have shattered any illusion I may have harbored about the company’s genuine concern for its users, employees, or the broader world. Despite publicly espousing lofty ideals, the company's alignment with entities that flagrantly violate international law and human rights—including their AI-powered targeting of the most vulnerable Palestinians—is a betrayal of any professed values.

As a long time Googler working in cloud, it has been heartbreaking to see the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and knowing that Google is complicit by providing cloud services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

To a large degree, this struggle is part of an ongoing effort to keep what made Google special: having a positive impact on the world through technological innovations, giving real weight to mottos like "Do the right thing", and being forthright and transparent with employees that dedicate so much of their time and energy about what our work is used for.

I ask that Google Cloud walk away from the Nimbus contract, prohibit providing cloud services for military purposes, be transparent to its employees about what our work is being used for, and not retaliate against employees who are in fact trying to retain what made Google special in the first place.

I'm appalled that Google has been lying to its workers about it's involvement in supporting the Israeli Ministry of Defense. This creates an unsafe environment for workers, where we cannot trust that our company is telling us the truth. Furthermore, Google has been complicit in the retaliation against workers who speak up, contributing to an even more unsafe environment where people fear expressing their opinions due to possible retaliation. Google is nothing without the labor of its workforce. We have a unique opportunity to come together and demand that Google stop it's retaliation against workers and end it's contract with the Israeli government. I do not condone my labor being used for the targeted murder of innocent civilians and I won't stay silent.