Google’s chief executive officer Sundar Pichai told US Senator Mark Warner that the company has ended some partnerships in China, reported Bloomberg.
The search engine giant’s ties to China were in the spotlight this week after technology investor Peter Thiel suggested on Sunday that the US government probe Google’s “seemingly treasonous” work. President Donald Trump said he wanted the US attorney general to look into the claims.
Google pulled its search engine from mainland China in 2010. But the company began developing a separate prototype Chinese search service as early as 2016. Reports of the project, called Dragonfly, surfaced shortly after Google nixed a US military contract, drawing criticism from the Pentagon and US politicians from both parties. Earlier this year, Google said it had moved staff off of Dragonfly, and on Tuesday Karan Bhatia, Google’s policy chief, said the project has been“terminated.”
“I do think there’s some explaining that Google needs to make,” Warner said in an interview with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Technology. “I’ve met with the Google CEO. He said they are backing out of some of those partnerships, and they’re willing to work with the US government.”