“My reaction was: What on earth are they doing?” Meredith Whittaker, cofounder of the AI Now Institute and one of the organizers of the 2018 Google Walkouts, told us. “It sounds like a very desperate kind of cover-your-ass move from a company that is really unsure about how to continue to do business as usual in the face of a growing outcry around the harms and implications of their technologies.”