Google LLC is working with the U.S. Department of Defense in a pilot project to help the agency analyze the countless hours of drone footage it collects, a partnership that reportedly hasn’t gone down too well with some people inside and outside the company.

The project is to assist the department in its “Project Maven” and its “Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team,” something that was announced last year. At the time, the Pentagon said it was spending some time in Silicon Valley trying to find commercial partners with an aim to understand better how artificial intelligence and automated video analysis could assist humans in going over hours of “mundane” drone footage taken in Iraq and Syria.

It seems that Google is now involved, with Gizmodo reporting today that people inside the company said emails had circulated discussing the project. According to the report, the news outraged a number of employees uncomfortable about developing technology used for military surveillance.

Google later confirmed the partnership, saying in a statement that indeed it was working with the DoD, offering the use of its TensorFlow machine learning technology to help build object recognition algorithms. The technology has been used by Google to detect images in photos, so its use is obvious for going through hours of drone video.

“We have long worked with government agencies to provide technology solutions,” a spokesperson said in the statement. “This specific project is a pilot with the Department of Defense, to provide open source TensorFlow APIs that can assist in object recognition on unclassified data. The technology flags images for human review and is for non-offensive uses only.”

Nonetheless, such a collaboration has chilled some employees at Google, raising “important ethical questions about the development and use of machine learning.” For its part, Google admitted that such a partnership “naturally raises valid concerns.”

Last year the DoD discussed “winning wars with computer algorithms” shortly after Project Maven was announced. “People and computers will work symbiotically to increase the ability of weapon systems to detect objects,” Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor said in a statement. “Eventually we hope that one analyst will be able to do twice as much work, potentially three times as much, as they’re doing now.”

Image: Nan Palmero via Flickr