Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos: America 'in big trouble' if Big Tech abandons Pentagon - Fox Business

MarketWatch senior reporter Jon Swartz discusses the safety scrutiny tech companies face as they move rapidly into new services.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that the U.S. is in "big trouble" if major tech companies abandon working with the Pentagon.

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"My view is that if big tech is turning their back on the Department of Defense, this country is in big trouble," Bezos said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday.

AMAZON FILES LAWSUIT OVER PENTAGON WAR CLOUD CONTRACT

"We are going to support the Department of Defense, this country is important," he said.

Bezos' statement comes shortly after Amazon filed a lawsuit on Friday challenging the Pentagon's decision to award its massive war cloud contract to the only other bidder in the procurement process — Microsoft.

The suit, filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, is over the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, a winner-take-all job that is valued at about $10 billion. It is intended to help the military upgrade and transfer classified data.

Bezos may have made the warning in light of Google's decision not to renew its contract with the U.S. Department of Defense for a drone project that sparked criticism among employees.

Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
AMZN	AMAZON.COM INC.	1,751.60	+11.12	+0.64%

Former Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced the decision regarding what is known as Project Maven in 2018, according to Gizmodo, which cited three sources. The initial contract, which is set to expire in 2019, was signed when the company was more focused on pursuing military work, Greene reportedly said, but employee backlash has sparked the decision not to renew.

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Project Maven is an artificial intelligence program designed to use data captured by government drones to identify and track objects viewed on surveillance footage. Google workers were concerned about how the application could be weaponized once under ownership of the U.S. military.

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FOX Business' Brittany De Lea contributed to this report.

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