The US military has lost access to personal recognition technology because of Apple

31. 1. 2020

In mid-January this year, Apple bought Xnor.ai, which focuses on the development of artificial intelligence in local hardware. According to some sources, the price reached hundreds of millions of dollars, Apple did not comment on the acquisition - as is its custom - in any detail. But after the acquisition, the detection of people on the Wyze security cameras, for which Xnor.ai previously provided the technology, stopped working. The reason was the termination of the contract for the provision of technology. Now, as part of the acquisition, Apple has terminated the contract that Xnor.ai concluded in the matter of military drones.

Xnor.ai reportedly collaborated on the controversial Project Maven, which uses artificial intelligence to detect people and objects in videos and photos taken by drones. The US Department of Defense project became public knowledge last year when it was revealed that Google was also temporarily involved in it. A Justice Department press release from last June talks about Project Maven's focus on "computer vision — one aspect of machine and deep learning — that autonomously extracts objects of interest from moving or still images."

Among other things, a petition signed by more than four thousand of its employees led to Google's withdrawal from the project. Apple, which places great importance on the privacy of individuals, did not wait for the petition and immediately withdrew from the project related to military drones.

Contracts with military entities are not unusual for large technology companies such as Microsoft, Amazon or Google. These are jobs that are not only quite lucrative, but also often quite controversial. But apparently Apple has no interest in orders and contracts in this area.

Apple has not yet officially commented on the acquisition of Xnor.ai, but according to some estimates, the buyout is supposed to contribute to the development of the voice assistant Siri, among other things.

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Source: 9to5Mac

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