Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and political activist had recently accused tech giant Google of supporting the Chinese military by supplying the latest AI technology to them. He also expressed that Google employees were left-leaning and anti-American. President Trump had also announced that he was going to investigate Google over Thiel’s claims.
After Thiel publicly accused Google of favoring the Chinese and calling for a federal investigation, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show where he presented several arguments about how Google was letting the Chinese infiltrate the company and so on.
“There’s this very peculiar background to where Google is working with the Chinese communist government and not the US military. But they are working with the communist Chinese and so the question is, what is the world is going on there?” said Thiel.
Thiel expressed two main perspectives regarding why Google was aiding the Chinese military over the US military. He said that the Chinese government had planted its intelligence agencies in the US for carrying out espionage activities and that advanced technologies such as AI, if not offered directly, will anyway be stolen through a backdoor.
So he said that Google might be offering their AI technology as a preemptive measure towards preventing any backdoor infiltration of the company.
While preventing a backdoor infiltration is the primary reason, the secondary reason according to Thiel is the fact that several Google employees are left-leaning and that Silicon Valley is dominated by the far-left political environment.
“There’s probably a broad base of Google employees that are ideologically super left-wing, sort of woke, and think that China’s better than the U.S. or that the U.S. is worse than China–it’s more anti-American than anything,” says Thiel.
Carlson then pointed out how the whole situation could be a national security threat and asked Thiel what he’d ask if the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai was sitting right in front of him.
Thiel said that he’d ask the following three questions:
1. How many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated Google?
2. Have the Chinese in particular infiltrated Google?
3. Why are you working with communist China and not the US?
It is to be noted that Thiel is a Republican and a conservative political activist who was one among the very few investors from the Silicon Valley to openly support Trump during the 2016 elections.
