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Billionaire investor Peter Thiel takes aim at Google for agreeing to work closely with China
- He calls for a US probe of the tech giant’s ‘seemingly treasonous’ acts
- Thiel also describes Donald Trump’s trade efforts in China as a ‘signature achievement’ of the administration
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Peter Thiel, one of US President Donald Trump’s top Silicon Valley supporters and donors, took aim at Google and the tech industry over the companies’ focus on global markets while brushing aside US interests.
In a speech on Sunday in Washington, the billionaire singled out Google for agreeing to work closely with China, trying to get its search engine back into the country, while deciding to let lapse a US Defence Department contract that gave the military access to its artificial intelligence tools.
Thiel, a Facebook board member, argued that the kind of AI developed by DeepMind, which like Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet, should be thought of as a potential “military weapon”.
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“We’ve been a lot more dishonest about that in Silicon Valley than the nuclear physicists were in the 1940s,” he said in the opening speech at the National Conservatism conference.
He then suggested Google’s actions were “seemingly treasonous”, asking whether DeepMind or Google senior management had been “infiltrated” by foreign intelligence agencies.
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“These questions need to be asked by the FBI and the CIA,” Thiel said. “And I’d like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner.”
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