Hundreds of Google Employees Urge CEO to Stop Acting as Trump's Puppet

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia - More than 580 Google employees are urging CEO Sundar Pichai to collaborate with the United States (US) government on developing military AI. The reason is that the tech giant cannot monitor the use of AI.

Among the hundreds of employees, there are more than 20 directors, senior directors, and vice presidents. There are also senior researchers from Google DeepMind, Google’s AI-related business unit.

“We are Google employees concerned about the negotiations currently taking place between Google and the US Department of Defense,” the letter states, quoted from The Next Web, Tuesday (28/4/2026).

Google employees describe the current collaboration as a mistake.

“As people working in the AI field, we know that these systems centralise power and they are indeed making a mistake,” the same letter reveals.

Sofia Liguori, a Google DeepMind AI research engineer in the UK, said the employees’ concern is to push the workforce to trust the company leadership to sign contracts. However, she, who also signed the letter, emphasised concerns about AI agents.

“Agent-based AI is very concerning because of the level of autonomy that can be achieved. It’s like giving a powerful tool and releasing control to the user,” she explained.

AI is known as a new tool in warfare, and the US is seriously pursuing this field. Google is known to be engaged in secret agreements with the government.

The deputy assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, confirmed the talks to use Gemini agents on secret cloud infrastructure.

“The Pentagon will start with non-secret areas because that’s where most users are, then we will reach the secret and top-secret stages,” Michael told Bloomberg in March.