Google has worked with the Israeli military since the early weeks of the Gaza war, competing with rival Amazon to provide artificial intelligence services, according to company documents obtained by the Washington Post.

The report, published on Tuesday, said Google employees became directly involved in providing the Israel Defense Forces with access to AI tools soon after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, which led to Israel’s bombing and ground invasion of Gaza.

A few weeks into the war, a Google cloud division employee escalated the IDF’s requests for access to AI technology, despite the US company’s public efforts to distance itself from Israel’s military operations, WaPo said, citing internal documents.

Another document revealed that an employee warned that if Google failed to provide access, the IDF might turn to Amazon for cloud computing services.

In a document dated November 2023, an employee reportedly thanked a colleague for handling the IDF’s request. Months later, additional requests for access to AI tools for the IDF were made by Google employees, documents show.

Last year, Google fired more than 50 workers who protested against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that Google and Amazon signed with the Israeli government in 2021. As part of the deal, the rival firms built data centers in Israel and committed to supplying cloud software and storage services to various government departments.

Activists behind the protests claimed that the Israeli military and intelligence agencies regularly violated human rights in Gaza. Company employees have demanded transparency on how their work is being used, fearing that the technology could contribute to harming Palestinian civilians.

According to the Post, the Israeli military has been ramping up its AI capabilities for years, focusing on surveillance imagery and the identification of potential targets.

The outlet cited an unnamed senior IDF official, who said last year that the military had made substantial investments in cloud technology and other computing systems, often in partnership with US companies.

Gaby Portnoy, the head of the Israeli government’s National Cyber Directorate, suggested at a conference last year that Project Nimbus directly assisted the IDF combat applications.

“Due to the Nimbus public cloud, phenomenal things happen in combat, which constitute a significant part of victory – and I won’t go into detail,” the media outlet People and Computers quoted him as saying.

The WaPo report said the documents did not explicitly show how the AI technology might have been used in Israel’s military operations. However, the outlet noted that the most recent November 2024 documents indicated that Google had continued to provide AI technology to the IDF at a time of increased airstrikes on Gaza, potentially affecting the civilian death toll.

Source: Rt.com

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The UK faces significant fiscal risks due to its rising borrowing costs and increasing debt levels, the boss of the world’s largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio, has warned.

Britain’s annual interest payments have surpassed £100 billion (roughly $125 billion), Dalio, the founder of investment management firm Bridgewater Associates, said in an interview with the Financial Times.

The recent sell-off in fixed-interest loan securities issued by the UK government, known as gilts, coupled with the weakening of the British pound, indicate that the market is struggling to absorb the government’s higher borrowing requirements, he explained.

“When you get to the point that you have to borrow money to service the debt and interest rates are rising, so that debt-service payments rise, so you need to borrow more money to pay them, you’re in what the markets call a death spiral,” the investor told the FT in Tuesday’s report.

The UK’s ten-year borrowing costs rose from 3.75% in mid-September to a 16-year high earlier this month at 4.93%, the outlet noted.

”As those risks increase, everybody looks at that need to borrow more money at higher interest, which creates [a] self-reinforcing debt deterioration cycle,” Dalio also pointed out.

The UK government in October adopted a budget for the financial year 2025/2026, pledging more funding for essential services and social support, and increased debt-servicing costs. Although the government announced tax increases, analysts have pointed out that these may not fully cover the additional spending, particularly amid slower economic growth.

The British pound has been declining since September, having lost about 8.2% of its value against the US dollar. The drop has been attributed to rising borrowing costs, market apprehension about the country’s debt levels, and reduced investor confidence.

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The trends have prompted another warning, this one from Berlin-based credit rating agency Scope Ratings. Recent moves in UK debt markets and the falling pound suggest that cracks may be appearing in Britain’s reserve currency status, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing Denis Shen, a top analyst at the agency. The UK’s vulnerability to emerging market-style sell-offs could jeopardize its AA credit rating, Shen warns.

In response to the challenges, the UK government said it remained “absolutely committed” to strict fiscal discipline. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have described their fiscal rules as “ironclad” and “non-negotiable.”