President Donald Trump said his administration would look into alleged treason being committed by Google in collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump said that Peter Thiel, who made the accusation, is “a great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone!”
“The Trump Administration will take a look!” the president added on July 16, citing a Fox & Friends segment about Thiel’s comments.
Trump wrote in March that Google was “helping China and their military, but not the U.S. Terrible!”
“Billionaire Tech Investor Peter Thiel believes Google should be investigated for treason. He accuses Google of working with the Chinese Government.” @foxandfriends A great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone! The Trump Administration will take a look!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2019
A White House spokesperson declined to comment on Trump’s tweet, reported the left-leaning CNBC website.
Thiel, a high-profile investor who took down the Gawker website and sits on the board of Facebook, said in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington on July 14 that investigators should ask three questions to Google executives.
“Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?” Thiel began, referring to the company’s DeepMind artificial intelligence project, which he said should be considered a potential military weapon.
“Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?” Thiel continued, reported the left-leaning Axios website.
“Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military… because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn’t go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?”
Thiel appeared on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Monday, saying people almost never talk the dual use of artificial intelligence.
“If it’s real, if this is a real thing, it obviously can also be used by the military, it’ll be weaponized in all sorts of ways, and it’s an important national security question as to who has it,” he said.
“There’s this very peculiar background where Google is working with the Chinese on Communist government and not with the U.S. military; so the Project Maven decision was a decision not to work with A.I., with the U.S. military—but they’re working with the Communist Chinese.”
Thiel suggested that Google’s touting of the project has made it susceptible to foreign interference.
“If you go around broadcasting that you’re building a Manhattan Project for A.I., I would think this naturally would draw the attention of foreign intelligence agencies,” he said. “I think the Chinese are confident enough, the Ministry of State Security is likely to have infiltrated Google, and then I think the Google management has sort of a decision of either letting the software go out the front door, or figuring, it will get stolen anyway and go out the back door.”
He said Google working with China may be because the company figures China will get the technology one way or another. “And then I think, of course, there’s probably, you know, a broad base of Google employees that are ideologically super left-wing sort of woke, and think that China is better than the U.S. Or that the U.S. is worse than China. It’s always—it’s more anti-American than anything.”
Joe Londsdale, who helped found the Palantir company with Thiel, echoed his comments to CNBC.
“Google is not a patriotic company,” he said. “Everyone in [Silicon] Valley knows that the Chinese government is very involved. It’s something we don’t talk about a lot. It was very courageous of [Thiel] to talk about it.”
After the accusations, a Google spokesperson told CNBC: ““As we have said before, we do not work with the Chinese military.”
