Google’s artificial intelligence technology is being used by the US Department of Defence to analyse drone footage, a rare and controversial move by a company that’s actively limited its work with the military in the past.
A Google spokeswoman said the company provides its TensorFlow application programming interfaces, or APIs, to a pilot project with the Department of Defence to help automatically identify objects in unclassified data. APIs are software-based rules that let computer programs communicate. TensorFlow is a popular set of APIs and other tools for AI capabilities such as machine learning and computer vision.