In September 2017, Google won the Project MAVEN contract from the Pentagon. Under the plan, Google was to build a monitoring system based on footage taken by U.S. drones and help the U.S. military quickly evaluate the drone footage using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Pentagon analysts were to monitor images of vehicles, people, land features and large crowds of the "entire city."

Google employees have exposed the matter, and it has aroused large-scale opposition. More than 3,000 employees signed a petition demanding that Google cancel the contract, and dozens of employees resigned to show their stance. Laura Nolan, a software engineer, was among them. When she heard that Google was developing software to assist the U.S. government's drones in military operations overseas, she decided not to participate in the project and protested with her resignation. 

After two months of resistance from a large number of employees, Google abandoned the military AI field in 2018, giving up the potential to earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year.