Microsoft [MSFT] has submitted a bid for the Pentagon’s massive cloud computing project, the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, the company said on Oct 26.
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, made the announcement in a blog post defending the company’s decision to work with the Pentagon amid growing concern from big tech employees regarding military use of their products, and while industry and Congress continue to scrutinize JEDI’s single award contract structure.
“Recently Microsoft bid on an important defense project. It’s the DoD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud project – or ‘JEDI’ – which will re-engineer the Defense Department’s end-to-end IT infrastructure, from the Pentagon to field-level support of the country’s servicemen and women. The contract has not been awarded but it’s an example of the kind of work we are committed to doing,” Smith wrote in his post.
Smith addressed pressure from employees to not bid JEDI due to concerns regarding the project’s potential use of Microsoft technology to apply artificial intelligence for warfighting applications.
“We appreciate the important new ethical and policy issues that artificial intelligence is creating for weapons and warfare. We want to use our knowledge and voice as a corporate citizen to address these in a responsible way through the country’s civic and democratic processes,” Smith said.
JEDI has received persistent industry criticism for its single-award contract structure, with officials viewing the strict requirements as potentially tailoring the competition toward only the largest cloud computing companies. The program faces two ongoing protests from Oracle [ORCL] and IBM [IBM].
Two members of the House Appropriations Committee, Reps. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) and Tom Cole (R-Okla.), recently sent a letter to the DoD inspector general calling for an investigation into the JEDI procurement effort with concerns that the competition is skewed towards a single contractor, likely Amazon [AMZN] Web Services.
Smith said the decision to bid JEDI was made this summer. Bids for the project were due on Oct. 12.