How Ukraine War Has Turned Ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt Into Licensed Arms Dealer

Mr Schmidt said that he is now a licensed arms dealer “because of the way the system works” (File)

Former Chief Executive Officer of Google, Eric Schmidt, has said that the Ukraine war has turned him into a licensed arms dealer, a career path he “doesn’t recommend”. Mr Schmidt’s new venture aims to  converge AI and defense technology to help Ukraine fight in the ongoing war against Russia.

Mr Schmidt reportedly delivered a lecture in Stanford University in April where he talked about how Russian atrocities in Ukraine affected him. “Watching the Russians use tanks to destroy apartment buildings with little old ladies and kids just drove me crazy,” he said.

Mr Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, along with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity, is working on a new start up called White Stork. “The idea basically is to do two things- use AI in complicated, powerful ways for these essentially robotic wars and the second one is to lower the cost of robots,” he said.

The lecture Mr Schmidt delivered at Stanford in April was posted by the university on its YouTube last week, according to a report in Business Insider. The lecture quickly went viral, however, it was later taken down.

In the lecture, Mr Schmidt reportedly informed that White Stork will mass-produce drones equipped with Artificial Intelligence to identify targets to eliminate the need for ground battles with tanks, artillery and mortar. 

In a clip of the lecture, now in wide circulation on X, formerly twitter, Mr Schmidt says, “The whole theory of armies is tanks, artilleries and mortar and we can eliminate all of them, and we can make the penalty for invading a country, at least by land, essentially be impossible.”

Mr Schmidt said that he is now a licensed arms dealer “because of the way the system works”. “A computer scientist, businessman, arms dealer. I do not recommend this in your career path, I’d stick with AI,” he said.

“Because of the way the laws work, we’re doing this privately and this is all legal with the support of the government, so it goes straight into Ukraine and then they fight the war,” he added.

The Russia-Ukraine war, which started in February 2022, has been going on for almost two and a half years now.

In the latest development, Ukrainian forces struck a third bridge in an attack on Russia’s Kursk region. According to Ukraine, the ongoing offensive in the Kursk region is aimed at creating a “buffer zone” and to bring war closer to an end.

Ukraine’s ongoing offensive in Kursk is said to be the biggest attack on Russia since World War II.