The American military is desperately trying to get a leg up in the field of artificial intelligence, which top officials are convinced will deliver victory in future warfare. But internal Pentagon documents and interviews with senior officials make clear that the Defense Department is reeling from being spurned by a tech giant and struggling to develop a plan that might work in a new sort of battle—for hearts and minds in Silicon Valley.

The battle began with an unexpected loss. In June, Google announced it was pulling out of a Pentagon program—the much-discussed Project Maven—that used the tech giant’s artificial intelligence software. Thousands of the company’s employees had signed a petition two months earlier calling for an end to its work on the project, an effort to create algorithms that could help intelligence analysts pick out military targets from video footage.

Inside the Pentagon, Google’s withdrawal brought a combination of frustration and distress—even anger—that has percolated ever since, according to five sources familiar with internal discussions on Maven, the military’s first big effort to utilize AI in warfare.

About This Story This article was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization.

“We have stumbled unprepared into a contest over the strategic narrative,” said an internal Pentagon memo circulated to roughly 50 defense officials on June 28. The memo depicted a department caught flat-footed and newly at risk of alienating experts critical to the military’s artificial intelligence development plans.

“We will not compete effectively against our adversaries if we do not win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the key supporters,” it warned.

Maven was actually far from complete and cost only about $70 million in 2017, a molecule of water in the Pentagon’s oceanic $600 billion budget that year. But Google’s announcement exemplified a larger public relations and scientific challenge the department is still wrestling with. It has responded so far by trying to create a new public image for its AI work and by seeking a review of the department’s AI policy by an advisory board of top executives from tech companies.

The reason for the Pentagon’s anxiety is clear: It wants a smooth path to use artificial intelligence in weaponry of the future, a desire already backed by the promise of several billion dollars to try to ensure such systems are trusted and accepted by military commanders, plus billions more in expenditures on the technologies themselves.

The exact role that AI will wind up playing in warfare remains unclear. Many weapons with AI will not involve decision-making by machine algorithms, but the potential for them to do so will exist. As a Pentagon strategy document said in August: “Technologies underpinning unmanned systems would make it possible to develop and deploy autonomous systems that could independently select and attack targets with lethal force.”

Developing artificial intelligence, officials say, is unlike creating other military technologies. While the military can easily turn to big defense contractors for cutting-edge work on fighter jets and bombs, the heart of innovation in AI and machine learning resides among the non-defense tech giants of Silicon Valley. Without their help, officials worry, they could lose an escalating global arms race in which AI will play an increasingly important role, something top officials say they are unwilling to accept.

“If you decide not to work on Maven, you’re not actually having a discussion on if artificial intelligence or machine learning are going to be used for military operations,” Chris Lynch, a former tech entrepreneur who now runs the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, said in an interview. AI is coming to warfare, he says, so the question is, which American technologists are going to engineer it?

Lynch, who recruits technical experts to spend several years working on Pentagon problems before returning to the private sector, said that AI technology is too important, and that the agency will proceed even if it has to rely on lesser experts. But without the help of the industry’s best minds, Lynch added, “we’re going to pay somebody who is far less capable to go build a far less capable product that may put young men and women in dangerous positions, and there may be mistakes because of it.”