Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Satya Nadella Monday defended his company’s $479 million contract to supply the Pentagon with augmented reality headsets after some employees asked that Microsoft end its ties with the military.

Late last year Microsoft won the contract to supply the Department of Defense with up to 100,000 units of its augmented reality headset HoloLens, a new version of which was introduced Sunday. In a statement the military said the headsets will be used to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy.”

That didn’t go down too well with some Microsoft’s employees, who in a letter to Nadella and President Brad Smith titled “HoloLens for good, not war.” They said they were “alarmed that Microsoft is working to provide weapons technology to the U.S. military, helping one country’s government ‘increase lethality’ using tools we built.”

The employees said this is not what they signed up for and they believe they should have some control over what they helped create. “Intent to harm is not an acceptable use of our technology,” said the letter, adding the company adheres to an ethics review for AI but it’s “not robust enough.” The letter states that technology “designed to help kill people” crosses the line.

Speaking to CNN at Mobile World Congress on Monday after the release of HoloLens 2, Nadella said the company would not change its mind on this. “We made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy,” he said.

Nadella went on, saying that Microsoft had a corporate responsibility to supply such technology to the country of its origin. “It’s not about taking arbitrary action by a single company, it’s not about 50 people or 100 people or even 100,000 people in a company,” he said. “It’s really about being a responsible corporate citizen in a democracy.”

For his part, Smith said in a 2018 blog post that employees can opt out of working on specific contracts if they are uncomfortable with them. “We believe in the strong defense of the United States and we want the people who defend it to have access to the nation’s best technology, including from Microsoft,” he added.

Photo: Office of Naval Research/Flickr