Documents show Microsoft and AWS secured contracts, worth $50M total, that appear linked to the Pentagon's Project Maven, following Google's exit
Thomas Brewster / Forbes : Tweets: @iblametom and @carnage4life Tweets: Thomas Brewster / @iblametom : NEW - After Google stopped working on drone surveillance software for the DOD Project Maven in 2018, guess who signed on more lucrative contracts to do much of the same work for the Pentagon? Amazon and Microsoft, with a dash of IBM! https://www.forbes.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Another chapter in the book of setting employee expectations. Google employees staged walkouts & protests because the company worked on image recognition tech for military. Now Amazon & Microsoft are now happily working on those projects and no one cares https://www.forbes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When Google walked away from Project Maven's drone-surveillance work in 2018 after employee protests, the assumption was the Pentagon's AI ambitions would suffer. Documents reported by Forbes show the opposite: Microsoft and AWS, with IBM in a supporting role, signed contracts worth $50M total to do much of the same work — the demand didn't disappear, it changed hands.
The arc matters because it wasn't a one-off. Google had already been a contender in the Pentagon's much larger cloud fight, where reporting on the $10B JEDI contract detailed backdoor lobbying and an advisory board shaping the contest. And by late 2021, Google itself was aggressively pursuing a major Pentagon cloud and AI contract — suggesting the 2018 exit cost it revenue its rivals captured in the interim.
First-order effects
- Microsoft and AWS inherit the drone-image-recognition work Google abandoned, converting a rival's employee-driven retreat into roughly $50M in defense contracts; IBM picks up a smaller slice of the same program.
- Google's 2018 walkout becomes a competitive handicap in retrospect: its internal activism handed named rivals the exact workload it refused, while a Pentagon memo exempting Maven documents from FOIA disclosure keeps the program's details behind a security carve-out.
Second-order effects
- Employee activism functions as a vendor-selection force rather than a stop mechanism — work migrates toward companies whose workforces don't block it, which pressures Google to reverse course, as its later Pentagon bid shows, and gives Microsoft and AWS a revenue base in defense AI that compounds through adjacent programs like JEDI.
- The FOIA exemption sets a template other defense AI programs can follow: contracts of this kind can be structured so that public accountability arrives only via leaks and document disclosures like this one, not formal records requests.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US defense AI procurement consolidates among a small set of hyperscale cloud providers willing to absorb internal dissent, and the binding constraint on military AI shifts from vendor ethics policies to which company's employees will tolerate the work.
- A former Google scientist's account of surveillance projects 'hidden in plain sight' points the same direction: the structural risk is an expanding gray zone of government-tech work that neither FOIA nor corporate transparency norms fully reach, making contract disclosures like this Forbes report the main public check.
The trend: US military AI work is migrating to whichever cloud provider's workforce won't block it, with employee activism redrawing the vendor map rather than shrinking the Pentagon's AI footprint.