Eric Schmidt Is De Facto Liaison Between Defense and Tech

Eric Schmidt took the reins at Google in 2001 and stepped down in 2017. Since then, he’s become the de facto liaison between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, the NYT reports.

A blunt assessment: “You absolutely suck at machine learning,” Schmidt told a four-star general in 2016. He started looking for military operations where Byzantine systems still ruled supreme and cutting-edge algorithms could be imported from the Valley.

• Schmidt chairs the Defense Innovation Board, which provides emerging tech guidance to the Pentagon.
• His work has raised questions about conflicts of interest.

As you might expect, this work is more controversial than ad targeting. Many tech employees don’t support defense projects. In 2018, thousands of Googlers protested their company’s work on Project Maven, a DoD program applying object recognition AI to drone imagery. Google eventually pulled out of the project.

Bottom line: The tech-defense relationship is complicated, but it’s not just Schmidt on a solo crusade. Microsoft and Amazon also have sizable cloud contracts with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.