Google drops out of Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud competition

Google is taking a pass at a potential $10 billion contract.

The tech giant has made the decision to sit out of the the Pentagon’s competition for a possible $10 billion cloud-computing project.

The Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud, or JEDI, is a project looking to find a solution for huge transfers of data from the Defense Department to military officials in order to make faster military decisions wherever in the world these officials may be.

Google cited its AI principles, which were published back in June, as the reason for dropping out of the bidding process.

Earlier this summer, Google announced it would not renew a contract with the Department of Defense for an artificial intelligence project dubbed Project Maven. The search giant was met with intense employee backlash over the project. Workers pressed that the company “should not be in the business of war” and urged Google to make clear policy stating that they will never “build warfare technology."

In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai outlined a long set of AI principles for the company to follow. First and foremost, the AI principles laid out that it would not use artificial intelligence to pursue projects that would cause “overall harm” or create weapons.

The Pentagon’s JEDI contract will be awarded to a single bidder, which led to a complaint from Oracle urging the government to split the contact up between multiple tech companies. Google had said if the contract was divided, it would have submitted a bid for certain parts that did run antithetical with the company’s values. The government has not yet responded to Oracle’s complaint.

Google’s move to pass on the contract comes just after news that the company exposed 500,000 users’ personal data due to a Google+ bug. Reports state that Google didn’t disclose the bug at first fearing regulatory repercussions from the government.