The employees' letter targets a specific technical condition that makes this Pentagon deal categorically different from prior military work. Classified air-gapped networks are by design inaccessible to outside monitoring — including by Google's own safety and ethics teams. The 580+ Google employees urging Pichai to refuse the classified military AI work explicitly named this gap: without visibility into how the AI operates in deployment, Google's published AI principles function as public relations rather than operational constraints. Google signed anyway, and its leadership's public framing — "proudly" — signals that the…