Google

Google is an American technology company incorporated in California in September 1998 and reincorporated in Delaware in August 2003, with executive offices in Mountain View, California.¹ The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Its parent, Alphabet Inc., has been the registrant in the company's annual filings since a holding company reorganization in October 2015, when a transfer restriction agreement between the company and Eric Schmidt was signed.² Google bought YouTube in October 2006 in an all-stock transaction announced at 1.65 billion dollars.³

Keyhole, In-Q-Tel and Google Earth

In February 2003 In-Q-Tel, the venture firm funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, invested in Keyhole, Inc., a maker of three-dimensional satellite-imagery mapping software. In a June 25, 2003 announcement In-Q-Tel said the investment was its first engagement on behalf of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and that within two weeks the agency was using the software within the Pentagon to support United States troops in Iraq.⁴ The announcement described In-Q-Tel as "a private nonprofit venture funded by the Central Intelligence Agency," and said that Keyhole's EarthViewer client "uses videogame-like 3-D graphics and access to massive databases of network-hosted earth information, including satellite imagery and aerial photography."⁴

Google announced on October 27, 2004 that it had acquired Keyhole Corp., which it described as a Mountain View digital mapping company founded in 2001, with financial terms not disclosed. The announcement listed "public agencies" among Keyhole's customers and said the software combined "a multi-terabyte database of mapping information and images collected from satellites and airplanes." Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, said the acquisition would enable users "to view 3D images of any place on earth."⁵ The product became Google Earth. Yasha Levine wrote that In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google stock in 2005 for 2.18 million dollars, and that Rob Painter, an In-Q-Tel executive, went to Google to run its federal sales. Levine also wrote that when he asked the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act for the terms of the transaction, the agency replied that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.⁶

Federal contracting records list the Department of the Navy as a buyer of Google Earth Pro licenses from Google LLC. Awards in September 2009, September 2010 and November 2011 were recorded at 4,200, 4,230 and 4,200 dollars, and a February 2013 renewal of eleven licenses carries no recorded amount.⁷

The 2010 cybersecurity arrangement and EPIC v. NSA

On January 12, 2010, David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, published a post on the Official Google Blog describing "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China" that the company had detected in mid-December 2009. The post said the attackers appeared to have aimed mainly at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and that only two Gmail accounts appeared to have been accessed.⁸ Reports on February 4, 2010 said that Google had contacted the NSA immediately after the attack. The former NSA director Mike McConnell called collaboration between the agency and private companies like Google "inevitable."⁹

On February 4, 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA for any agreement between the agency and Google on cyber security, records of communications about Gmail encryption, and records of the NSA's role in Google's decision not to encrypt routinely cloud services such as Google Docs. The NSA's March 10, 2010 reply declined to confirm or deny that it had any relationship with Google, citing FOIA Exemption 3 and Section 6 of the National Security Agency Act of 1959.¹⁰ The district court wrote that "Section 6 of the NSA Act is a statutory exemption under Exemption 3," and described the NSA's information assurance mission as "protecting Department of Defense and other national-security information systems."¹⁰ In support of the agency's motion, a declaration by the NSA's deputy associate director for policy and records argued that "[t]o confirm or deny the existence of any such records would be to reveal whether the NSA ... determined that vulnerabilities or cybersecurity issues pertaining to Google or certain of its commercial technologies could make U.S. government information systems susceptible to exploitation or attack."¹⁰

Judge Richard J. Leon granted summary judgment to the NSA on July 13, 2011.¹⁰ The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed on May 11, 2012. The panel described the request as seeking communications between the NSA and Google about encryption and cyber security, stated that the agency had issued a Glomar response under FOIA Exemption 3, and affirmed the judgment for the NSA.¹¹ The opinion also recorded that Google had changed Gmail's privacy settings "to automatically encrypt all traffic to and from its servers" after the attack.¹¹

PRISM

In June 2013 the Washington Post published NSA slides from the documents provided by Edward Snowden. One slide, headed "Dates When PRISM Collection Began For Each Provider," lists Google with the date 1/14/09. It appears after Microsoft (9/11/07), Yahoo (3/12/08) and Facebook (6/3/09), and before PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple, which the slide marks as added in October 2012. The same slide gives a program cost of about 20 million dollars per year.¹²

On June 7, 2013, Page and Drummond wrote on the Google blog that the company had not joined "any program that would give the U.S. government ... direct access to our servers," and that the government "does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers."¹³ In an April 2, 2026 staff report on the surveillance program operated under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board stated that the 2024 reauthorization law "added a new category of electronic communication service providers." The report also stated that the government had reported applying the amended definition "in a limited manner consistent with" its commitments to Congress.¹⁴ The Board's July 2, 2014 report on the program had described PRISM collection as the transmission of selectors, such as an email address, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on behalf of the NSA to a United States electronic communications service provider that had been served a directive. It stated that as of mid-2011, 91 percent of the Internet communications the NSA acquired each year were obtained through PRISM collection, that the NSA receives all PRISM collection and that the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI each receive a portion, and that the government had not declassified the specific providers served with directives.¹⁵

Eric Schmidt and the policy network

Schmidt was chief executive of Google from 2001 to 2011.¹⁶ His term on the Alphabet board ended on June 19, 2019, when, according to the company's 2020 proxy statement, he and Diane Greene did not seek re-election.¹⁷ The 2020 proxy's beneficial ownership table lists Schmidt with 3,937,963 Class B shares, based on a Schedule 13G/A filed February 14, 2020 by Schmidt and the Schmidt Family Living Trust.¹⁷ The Tech Transparency Project reported that Schmidt chaired the Defense Innovation Board from 2016 to 2020 under Ash Carter.¹⁸

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, established by Section 1051 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, was chaired by Schmidt, with Robert Work as vice chair, and issued its final report in March 2021. The fifteen commissioners were nominated by Congress and the executive branch. Besides Schmidt they included Andrew Moore, who had worked at Google from 2006 to 2014, founded its Pittsburgh engineering office in 2006, and became head of the Google Cloud artificial intelligence division in January 2019; Chris Darby, president and chief executive of In-Q-Tel since September 2006; Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel's first chief executive from 1999 to 2006; Safra Catz, chief executive of Oracle Corporation; Andrew Jassy of Amazon Web Services; and Eric Horvitz of Microsoft. The report listed among its recommendations a joint emerging-technology investment consortium "Modeled on In-Q-Tel" and described Project Maven, launched in 2017, as one of the "pockets of excellence" in the Defense Department's use of artificial intelligence.¹⁹ In October 2022 CNBC reported that Schmidt had helped write artificial intelligence laws in Washington without publicly disclosing his investments in AI start-ups.²⁰ Schmidt and his wife Wendy Schmidt launched Schmidt Futures in 2017, which is funded chiefly through a private foundation.²¹

In March 2022 Politico reported that Schmidt Futures had paid for staff of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Its chief innovation officer, Tom Kalil, stayed on the Schmidt Futures payroll for four months while serving as an unpaid consultant to the office, and the organization indirectly covered the salary of the office's chief of staff for about six weeks. Schmidt called the report "largely false."²²²³

The Special Competitive Studies Project was announced on October 5, 2021 as a think tank founded by Schmidt and modeled on the Special Studies Project that Nelson Rockefeller sponsored in 1956 and Henry Kissinger led, and it grew directly out of the commission.²⁴ Its board, as the project describes it, has included Work, Nadia Schadlow, Michele Flournoy and Mac Thornberry, and it is led by Ylli Bajraktari.²⁵ In 2024 Schmidt Futures consolidated its core scientific work into a new charitable organization, Schmidt Sciences.²⁶ In 2012 the video startup Waywire listed former Google chairman Eric Schmidt among its backers, according to a 2013 article in Inc. magazine that also examined the tech ties of Cory Booker.²⁷

Project Maven

On April 26, 2017, the deputy secretary of defense established the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, known as Project Maven, "to accelerate DoD's integration of big data and machine learning." Its first task was to field technology to augment or automate processing, exploitation and dissemination for tactical unmanned aerial systems and mid-altitude full-motion video in support of the Defeat-ISIS campaign. The memorandum said the team would initially provide computer vision algorithms for object detection, classification and alerts.²⁸

The Intercept reported on June 1, 2018 that Google would keep working on Maven through March 2019 and would not renew the contract after its eighteen-month term.²⁹ The report said that Google executives had tried to describe the work as a contract of about 9 million dollars, while leaked information indicated that the company expected the Maven work to grow to about 250 million dollars a year. The same report said that Google had not committed to forgo signing other military contracts involving artificial intelligence.²⁹

In June 2018 Google published AI principles that list, among the applications it would not pursue, "Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people."³⁰ The principles page also states: "while we are not developing AI for use in weapons, we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas. These include cybersecurity, training, military recruitment, veterans' healthcare, and search and rescue."³⁰ Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, pointed to Google's 2018 withdrawal from Project Maven, under employee pressure, as a warning of what he called self-centered libertarianism, in his book The Technological Republic.³¹ Palantir's Maven Smart System contract was expanded by 795 million dollars in May 2025.³²

Government contracts

Federal contracting records list Google Public Sector LLC as an awardee under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) multiple-award contract. A task order from the Defense Information Systems Agency dated December 8, 2022 records an award amount of 13,216,056 dollars.³³ On September 12, 2025 the Department of the Army issued a task order against the same contract recorded at 28,749,906.09 dollars,³⁴ and on July 1, 2026 the Defense Logistics Agency issued a JWCC task order for its information operations recorded at 12,494,557.96 dollars.³⁵ Earlier Defense Department awards to Google LLC in the same database include Army and Navy purchases from 2009 onward for mapping software and training, a Navy award for "multispectral images" in 2015 at 50,000 dollars, and a 2025 Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences order for incident remediation recorded at 173,750 dollars.⁷ Smaller Google Public Sector task orders in the same database include a Defense Information Systems Agency order titled "Golden Forge" from March 2025 recorded at 122,249.39 dollars and an Air Force defensive cyber systems order from September 2024 recorded at 488,750 dollars.³⁶ The company's 2025 annual report states that its business with public sector customers "may present additional risks," and that "we may be subject to government audits and cost reviews."³⁷

In July 2025 the Department of Defense granted up to 200 million dollars each to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI for artificial intelligence work.³⁸

Lobbying and political committee

Google Client Services LLC is the registrant on the company's lobbying disclosures under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Summing its four quarterly reports for each year, it reported expenses of 2.84 million dollars for 2008, 5.16 million for 2010, 16.48 million for 2012, 21.21 million for 2018, 7.53 million for 2020, 12.03 million for 2023 and 13.1 million for 2025, and 6.43 million for the first two quarters of 2026.³⁹

The third-quarter 2013 report, posted October 21, 2013 with expenses of 3.37 million dollars for the quarter, carries an issue entry titled "Transparency related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and national security orders," with S. 1215 (the FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act of 2013) and S. 1452 (the Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013) among the listed bills. The government entities listed on the report include the Executive Office of the President, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. The first-quarter 2014 report lists H.R. 3361 and S. 1599, the USA FREEDOM Act, and the first-quarter 2018 report lists "Reauthorization or reform of FISA Section 702 program" and the CLOUD Act.⁴⁰ The second-quarter 2018 report, posted July 20, 2018, lists "AI Principles" under science and technology.⁴¹ From the fourth quarter of 2023 the reports carry separate Defense entries for "Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) and procurement" and Intelligence entries for FISA reform bills (H.R. 6611 and S. 3351, and H.R. 6570). The fourth-quarter 2025 report, posted January 20, 2026, lists under Intelligence the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026 and "Encryption."⁴²

Google LLC NetPAC (FEC committee C00428623), a lobbyist/registrant political action committee, first filed on September 14, 2006. Its receipts were 318,805 dollars in the 2008 election cycle, 1,850,965 dollars in 2012, 2,250,154 in 2014, 2,224,734 in 2018 and 1,902,225 in 2024, almost entirely individual contributions. Its contributions to federal candidate committees were 1,015,500 dollars in 2012, 2,161,700 in 2016, 1,891,323 in 2018 and 1,409,500 in 2024. In 2016 its largest recipients were the National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee (30,000 dollars each), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (20,000) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (15,000); in 2024 the DSCC, DCCC, NRSC and NRCC received 30,000 dollars each.⁴³

DeepMind and the AI cluster

DeepMind Technologies Limited was incorporated on September 23, 2010 at Companies House, the United Kingdom's company registry. Its officer list shows Demis Hassabis as a director from December 7, 2010 to January 24, 2014, Luke Nosek from February 23, 2011 to January 24, 2014, Jaan Tallinn from December 23, 2011 to January 24, 2014, and Shane Legg from December 23, 2011 to January 24, 2014. Mustafa Suleyman served as a director from December 23, 2011 to January 24, 2014. On January 24, 2014 Kenneth Hohee Yi was appointed a director, with a correspondence address at Google LLC in New York.⁴⁴

Companies House lists DeepMind Holdings Limited as the only active person with significant control, notified on November 4, 2019 as holding at least 75 percent of the shares and voting rights. Before that date the register listed Alphabet Inc., of Delaware, in the same role from April 6, 2016.⁴⁵ TechCrunch reported on January 26, 2014 that Google had acquired DeepMind for more than 500 million dollars and that its early investors included Tallinn, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Founders Fund and Horizons Ventures.⁴⁶

Tallinn led the Series A round of Anthropic in May 2021, with participation from Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, James McClave and the Center for Emerging Risk Research, according to the company's announcement of a 124 million dollar raise.⁴⁷ Ilya Sutskever completed his doctorate at the University of Toronto in 2012 under Geoffrey Hinton. The three researchers on the AlexNet work packaged it into DNNresearch, which Google acquired in 2013, bringing Sutskever to Google Brain.⁴⁸ Ray Kurzweil, whose forecasts are described under Singularitarianism, joined Google as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing, a hire announced on December 14, 2012.⁴⁹

CNBC reported in January 2025 that Google's earlier investments in Anthropic totaled 2 billion dollars and gave it a 10 percent ownership stake, and that Google had agreed to a further investment of more than 1 billion dollars.⁵⁰ The April 2025 funding round of Safe Superintelligence, reported at a valuation of 32 billion dollars, listed Alphabet among its backers, and Google Cloud became a major compute provider to the lab.⁵¹⁵²

In December 2023 the Bloomberg profile of Effective Accelerationism identified Guillaume Verdon as the person behind the "Beff Jezos" account. Verdon had worked at Google's X moonshot lab on TensorFlow Quantum and later founded Extropic AI.⁵³⁵⁴

In testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on July 21, 2026, Ben Buchanan cited a Google report that Russian military intelligence had deployed malware in Ukraine that "uses AI mid-operation to write its own attack commands."⁵⁵

Employees and research

Timnit Gebru managed Google's Ethical AI team until December 2020. After a dispute over a paper she had co-written on large language models, she sent an email to women and allies in Google Brain about the company's treatment of the paper and of diversity work, and Google cut off her corporate account. Platformer published the email and the reply sent to employees by Jeff Dean, then the head of Google Research, which said that the paper had been submitted before internal review was complete and that a cross-functional team had found that it "didn't meet our bar for publication."⁵⁶

In 2018 Nate Thomas, later chief executive of Redwood Research, was lead author of a paper with five Google researchers in Mountain View, "Tensor field networks: Rotation- and translation-equivariant neural networks for 3D point clouds." The paper gives his affiliation as Stanford University.⁵⁷ Bret Taylor was a group product manager at Google before June 2007, where he co-created Google Maps.⁵⁸ Alexander Scaramucci listed more than a year at Google, followed by a period as an entrepreneur-in-residence, on his LinkedIn page as quoted by a 2017 Bustle article.⁵⁹ Justin Rosenstein, who co-founded Asana with Dustin Moskovitz, was a Google product manager and, before that, a Facebook engineering manager.⁶⁰ A patent granted on July 10, 2001 to an inventor named Eugene Jhong (with co-inventor Karen E. Theisen), for a method of generating and navigating a 3-D representation of a hierarchical data structure, names Elastic Technology, Inc. as assignee; Eugene Jhong, listed on the Philanthropic Advisory Board of the Galileo Project, holds a Stanford master's degree in computer science.⁶¹

Investors, grants and policy sponsors

The Federation for American Immigration Reform reported paying Google 1,713,143 dollars for advertising in 2021 and 1,105,067 dollars in 2022.⁶²⁶³ The 2021 accounts of the HOPE not hate charitable trust list restricted funds from Google among its grant income.⁶⁴ At the 100,000 to 249,999 dollar level, Google appeared among the supporters of the Center for a New American Security for the period October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025.⁶⁵

In March 2026 Omidyar Network announced that Michele Jawando, who had been a senior executive at Google, would succeed Mike Kubzansky as chief executive.⁶⁶

In a 2007 essay on Neocameralism, Mencius Moldbug wrote that subscribers to a "sovcorp" "can sell every share in the sovcorp to Google if they like," and that this would lead to "a terrifying new era of permanent global Googocracy."⁶⁷

Child safety and legal process

Federal law requires electronic service providers with actual knowledge of apparent violations involving Child sexual abuse material to report them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which operates the CyberTipline.⁶⁸ The federal statute describes NCMEC as "statutorily obliged to operate the official national clearinghouse for information about missing and exploited children," and the Tenth Circuit noted that NCMEC must forward every report it receives to federal law enforcement.⁶⁹ In United States v. Ackerman, decided August 5, 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that the NCMEC is a governmental entity or agent for Fourth Amendment purposes. The case concerned an email that AOL had blocked through an automated hash-matching filter, after which an NCMEC analyst opened the email and its attachments. Google, Inc. is among the amici curiae listed in the opinion, together with Dropbox, Facebook, Microsoft, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter.⁶⁹ The Internet Watch Foundation member list shows Google as a member since 2004 in its tier of contributors above 90,000 pounds.⁷⁰

The Iowa State University Police Department issued subpoenas to electronic service providers including Google in the investigation that led to the case against Clint Borge, which began with a November 2020 report by a first-year student.⁷¹⁷² An affidavit in the case against Leonidas Varagiannis states that a Google account registered under the name "War" was associated with a YouTube channel, and it lists that association among the grounds for attributing accounts to him.⁷³

In April 2023 a federal judge in Espírito Santo, Brazil, ordered the Telegram application suspended nationwide during a neo-Nazi groups inquiry linked to the 2022 Aracruz School Shootings, and directed Google and Apple to remove it from their app stores. The suspension was lifted on April 28, 2023.⁷⁴⁷⁵

Gonzalez v. Google

On May 18, 2023 the Supreme Court of the United States issued a per curiam opinion in Gonzalez v. Google LLC (No. 21-1333), a suit under 18 U.S.C. 2333 alleging that Google aided and abetted and conspired with ISIS through YouTube. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had held most claims barred by Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act, except claims that Google approved ISIS videos for advertisements and shared proceeds through YouTube's revenue-sharing system, which it held failed to state a claim in any event. The Court wrote that it would "decline to address the application of 230 to a complaint that appears to state little, if any, plausible claim for relief," and vacated and remanded for reconsideration in light of its decision in Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh.⁷⁶ The Counter Extremism Project and Hany Farid had filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners on December 7, 2022.⁷⁷

Antitrust

The court's August 2023 opinion describes Google LLC as operating "the largest Internet general search engine in the United States," and states that advertisers "spend over $80 billion annually just to reach general search users."⁷⁸ The Department of Justice and the attorneys general of eleven states filed suit against Google on October 20, 2020. Both sets of plaintiffs alleged that Google's exclusive contracts unlawfully maintained its monopoly power in general search. The contracts make Google the default search engine with browser developers, "most notably Apple and Mozilla," and with device makers and wireless carriers.⁷⁸ In an August 4, 2023 memorandum opinion on summary judgment, the court (Judge Amit Mehta) held that the SA360 component of the attorneys general's claims survives summary judgment.⁷⁸ The company's 2025 annual report states that the court ruled against Google in August 2024 and entered a final judgment in December 2025 requiring remedies that restrict how Google distributes its services and require it to share certain search data with, and offer syndication services to, certain competitors. Google appealed in January 2026, and the Justice Department and state attorneys general appealed in February 2026.⁷⁹

In the advertising technology case brought in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in January 2023, the presiding judge issued a mixed decision in April 2025. The judge ruled that Google's advertiser tools and its DoubleClick and AdMeld acquisitions were not anticompetitive, and that its publisher tools unfairly excluded rivals. A remedies proceeding in September 2025 included a Justice Department proposal for structural remedies, which the company's annual report says could harm its business.⁸⁰ A separate California jury verdict against Google in the Epic Games case, delivered in December 2023 over the business of the Google Play store, was followed by a remedies decision in October 2024 that ordered changes to Android and Google Play contracts and operations. Google appealed the judgment.⁸¹

The Epstein record

A calendar page from the files of Jeffrey Epstein lists, for March 1, 2013, a 9:30 a.m. appointment with David Mitchell, whom the entry describes as "AdFin CEO," of AdFin Solutions, Eyal Manor ("guy from Google") and one other person.⁸² AdFin was a programmatic-advertising data company, and Mitchell was among its investors. On March 21, 2013 Mitchell wrote to Epstein about the voting rights attached to the investment, and the emails of March 21 and 22, 2013 concern the company.⁸³ AdFin's Form D, filed December 31, 2013, is signed by Jeanne Houweling as chief executive and lists Mitchell as a director.⁸⁴

Google's own records place an Eyal Manor in the company's advertising exchange business in the months before the meeting. A June 2012 post on the Google Research blog on a market algorithms workshop at Google describes "Eyal Manor, Google engineering director for the Ad Exchange," who "gave an overview of the design and functioning of the exchange."⁸⁵ A Google document dated August 27, 2012, titled "Growing AdX" and introduced in the Justice Department's advertising technology case against Google, lists a team of Scott Spencer, Drew Bradstock, Ari Feldman and Eyal Manor and projects that the exchange could be a business of 3 to 4 billion dollars in 2014.⁸⁶ A Smartsheet board biography states that Manor later served as vice president of engineering, product and general manager at Google Cloud and that during his tenure at Google he led engineering groups at YouTube and played a key role in the development of Google's ads products.⁸⁷ The calendar gives no title for the Google attendee; the identification of the calendar's Eyal Manor with the Google advertising engineer rests on the name, the Google description and the advertising subject of the meeting.