15 million over 18 months according to an internal emailbut some company officials saw it as an opening to much greater revenue down the road in an email last september a google official in washington told colleagues she expected maven to grow into a 250 millionayear project and eventually it could have helped open the door to contracts worth far more notably a multiyear multibilliondollar cloud computing project called jedi or joint enterprise defense infrastructurewhether googles maven decision is a shortterm reaction to employee protests and adverse news coverage or reflects a more sweeping strategy not to pursue military work is unclear the question of whether a particular contract contributes to warfare does not always have a simple answerwhen the maven work came under fire inside google company officials asserted that it was not offensive in nature but maven is using the companys artificial intelligence software to improve the sorting and analysis of imagery from drones and some drones rely on such analysis to identify human targets for lethal missile shotsgoogle management had told employees that it would produce a set of principles to guide its choices in the use of artificial intelligence for defense and intelligence contracting at fridays meeting ms greene said the company was expected to announce those guidelines next weekgoogle has already said that the new artificial intelligence principles under development precluded the use of ai in weaponry but it was unclear how such a prohibition would be applied in practice and whether it would affect googles pursuit of the jedi contractdefense department officials are themselves wrestling with the complexity of their move into cloud computing and artificial intelligence critics have questioned the proposal to give the entire jedi contract which could extend for 10 years to a single vendor this week officials announced they were slowing the contracting process downdana white the pentagon spokeswoman said this week that the jedi contract had drawn incredible interest and more than 1000 responses to a draft request for proposals but she said officials wanted to take their timeso we are working on it but its important that we dont rush toward failure ms white said this is different for us we have a lot more players in it this is something different from some of our other acquisition programs because we do have a great deal of commercial interestms greene said the company probably would not have sought the maven work if company officials had anticipated the criticism according to notes on ms greenes remarks taken by a google employee and shared with the timesanother person who watched the meeting added that ms greene said maven had been terrible for google and that the decision to pursue the contract was done when google was more aggressively going after military workgoogle does other more innocuous business with the pentagon including military advertising on google properties and googles ad platform as well as providing web apps like emailmeredith whittaker a google ai researcher who was openly critical of the maven