What we know

Here’s what we know about Project Nimbus:

Through Project Nimbus, Thomas Kurian led Google to make a deal with Israel in 2021 to agree to provide technology to an apartheid state with little oversight or application of their own stated AI principles.

• The company accepted “a non negotiable contract on terms favorable to the government,” in which the Israeli “government has unilateral right to impose contract changes.” As a result, Google would retain “almost no ability to sue [Israel] for damages” stemming from “permitted uses … breaches.”
• Google’s touted AI principles are not in the contract, against the recommendations of its own human rights consultants.
• Google knew it was facing an “onerous risk” and that it could run into conflicts with foreign and international authorities, and potentially breach international law.

Google even went so far as to make an exception for Israel in order to close the Project Nimbus deal.

• Google already prohibits the sale and use of its artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to sensitive customers in many countries, but did not do so for Israel, against the recommendations of its human rights consultants.
• Google lawyer Edward du Boulay, in 2020: “If Google wins the competition, we will need to accept a non negotiable contract on terms favourable to the [Israeli] government.”

External and internal Google advisors explicitly expressed the potential that Project Nimbus would be used for “the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank.”

• Google’s lawyers, policy team employees, and outside consultants, who were asked to assess the risks of the agreement, wrote that since “sensitive customers” like Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Israeli Security Agency were included in the contract, “Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank.”

Project Nimbus *is* about the Israeli military, despite Google executives’ repeated lies that it is not.

• According to The New York Times, the bulk of the money Google is getting from Nimbus is from Israel’s Ministry of Defense (over 70% of their overall government revenue).
• Yet Google executives, including Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Google’s President of Global Affairs Kent Walker, have been lying to workers and the public about how Google Cloud Provider is used by the Israeli government.

Even though these claims have been debunked, Google spokespersons have repeatedly copy and pasted false statements to multiple news outlets.

• Spokespeople have said that Project Nimbus “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” Further, the company has stated, “the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.”
• They said it to TIME
• They said it to WIRED
• They said it to The Verge
• They said it to The Intercept
• They said it to the Canada House of Commons
• They gave that same quote to The New York Times
• These are lies.

Project Nimbus’ contract states that is *not* subject to regular Google Cloud’s Terms of Service, which would prohibit using Google’s technology to cause harm.

• The Project Nimbus contract states, “There will be no restrictions on the part of the Provider [Google] as to the type of system and information that the Clients [Israeli government] may migrate to the service, including vital systems of high sensitivity level.”

Google fed these lies to us, its own workers.

• During an October 30, 2024 TGIF meeting, Google’s President of Google’s Global Affairs, Kent Walker, was asked how the company is ensuring its Nimbus work is consistent with its “AI Principles” document, which forbids uses “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including surveillance, weapons, or anything “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
• Kent Walker replied, “When it comes to the Nimbus contract, in particular, this is a contract that is designed and directed at our public cloud work, not at specific military classified sensitive information. It’s not designed for that. And everything that’s on our Cloud network, our public Cloud, is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy and our Terms of Service. So, you know, I can assure you that we take all this seriously.”
• This is false. We know Google ended up signing a contract with adjusted terms of service with ruinous constraints on supervision or oversight. We also know, from reporting by The New York Times, that the bulk of the money Google is getting from Nimbus is from Israel’s Ministry of Defense (over 70% of their overall government revenue).

All of this is for profit. Instead of prioritizing ethics (something as ethically clear-cut as NOT powering a genocide), its own workers, or even its public brand perception, it is clear that Google and Thomas Kurian only care about the bottom line.

• This contract in of itself does not express the full value of Project Nimbus to Google. Google is using Project Nimbus to pave the way for massive military and defense contracts.
• According to The New York Times, “Though the deal, for seven years, was tiny for a company with $258 billion in sales in 2021, it was an important government contract for Google’s cloud computing business, which was struggling to compete with much larger cloud businesses at Amazon and Microsoft.”

What we don’t know

While we know Project Nimbus is being used by the Israeli military and government, we don’t know a lot about what this contract looks like. Google workers have questions:

• We know that, despite Kent Walker’s statements otherwise, the Israeli military is not subject to Google’s standard Terms of Service. What is in the “Amended Terms of Service” that Google carved out specifically for Israel, and not any other government that it works with?
• We know that Amazon’s cloud technology is being used to ‘click and order’ military intelligence to target and kill civilians. What is the Israeli military using Google’s cloud technology to do as it wages a year-long genocide against the Palestinian people?
• Google has gone so far as to fire over 50 of its workers for raising concerns about the contract that its own lawyers and consultants did, and thousands of workers across the company have asked questions to no avail. What else are Google executives trying to hide about Project Nimbus?