The decision to abandon the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recruitment targets comes after the company carried out an annual review of its corporate policies.

The technology giant is also reviewing some of its other DEI programmes.

US President Donald Trump and his allies have regularly attacked DEI policies. Since his return to the White House just over two weeks ago, Trump has ordered government agencies to eliminate such initiatives.

“We’re committed to creating a workplace where all our employees can succeed and have equal opportunities,” a Google spokesperson said.

“We’ve updated our [annual investor report] language to reflect this, and as a federal contractor our teams are also evaluating changes required following recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.”

The story was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Between 2021 and 2024, Google’s investor reports stated its commitment to make “diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do”. That line is not in its latest report, which was published on Wednesday.

In recent years, Google had been an outspoken supporter of DEI targets, particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the protests that followed his death.

At the time, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, set a five-year goal to increase the number of its leaders who came from underrepresented groups by 30%.

According to the company, the proportion of black people among its leadership almost doubled between 2020 and last year. It also said representation of women and Latino people had increased in those roles.

Google is the latest major company to make a U-turn on its diversity policies.

Meta, Amazon, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Walmart and others have rolled back their DEI programmes.

Apple has stood out by pushing back against this trend. Last month, the tech giant’s board asked investors to vote against a proposal to end its diversity policies.

The proposal by conservative group, the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), called on the iPhone maker to abolish its DEI policies, saying they expose firms to “litigation, reputational and financial risks”.

Last week, the retail chain Target was sued by a group of shareholders, led by the City of Riviera Beach Police Pension Fund in Florida, who said the firm had defrauded them by allegedly concealing the risks associated with its DEI policies.

The lawsuit referred to a 2023 backlash over LGBTQ+ merchandise at its stores, which caused both its sales and its stock price to drop.

Target has also recently announced that it was ending its DEI targets.

In the latest example of the Trump administration’s disapproval of such policies, the US President last week speculated, without giving evidence, that DEI had led to an air crash in Washington DC.

The remarks, which came less than 24 hours after the crash, were in line with the White House’s efforts to undo such programmes.

The firm has rewritten the principles guiding its use of AI, dropping a section which ruled out uses that were “likely to cause harm”.

In a blog post Google senior vice president James Manyika, and Demis Hassabis, who leads the AI lab Google DeepMind, defended the move.

They argue businesses and democratic governments need to work together on AI that “supports national security”.

There is debate amongst AI experts and professionals over how the powerful new technology should be governed in broad terms, how far commercial gains should be allowed to determine its direction, and how best to guard against risks for humanity in general.

There is also controversy around the use of AI on the battlefield and in surveillance technologies.

The blog said the company’s original AI principles published in 2018 needed to be updated as the technology had evolved.

“Billions of people are using AI in their everyday lives. AI has become a general-purpose technology, and a platform which countless organisations and individuals use to build applications.

“It has moved from a niche research topic in the lab to a technology that is becoming as pervasive as mobile phones and the internet itself,” the blog post said.

As a result baseline AI principles were also being developed, which could guide common strategies, it said.

However, Mr Hassabis and Mr Manyika said the geopolitical landscape was becoming increasingly complex.

“We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality and respect for human rights,” the blog post said.

“And we believe that companies, governments and organisations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth and supports national security.”

The blog post was published just ahead of Alphabet’s end of year financial report, showing results that were weaker than market expectations, and knocking back its share price.

That was despite a 10% rise in revenue from digital advertising, its biggest earner, boosted by US election spending.

In its earnings report the company said it would spend $75bn ($60bn) on AI projects this year, 29% more than Wall Street analysts had expected.

The company is investing in the infrastructure to run AI, AI research, and applications such as AI-powered search.

Google’s AI platform Gemini now appears at the top of Google search results, offering an AI written summary, and pops up on Google Pixel phones.

Originally, long before the current surge of interest in the ethics of AI, Google’s founders, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, said their motto for the firm was “don’t be evil”. When the company was restructured under the name Alphabet Inc in 2015 the parent company switched to “Do the right thing”.

Since then Google staff have sometimes pushed back against the approach taken by their executives. In 2018 the firm did not renew a contract for AI work with the US Pentagon following a resignations and a petition signed by thousands of employees.

They feared “Project Maven” was the first step towards using artificial intelligence for lethal purposes.

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring the body of water – which is bordered by the US, Cuba and Mexico – be renamed the Gulf of America in his first week in office.

But it will only appear on Google Maps with the new name for people based in the US – elsewhere in the world it will retain its current name, which has been used for hundreds of years.

There is no international organisation responsible for the naming of bodies of water.

But Mexico argues the U.S. cannot legally change the Gulf’s name because the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea dictates that an individual country’s sovereign territory only extends up to 12 nautical miles out from the coastline.

“[The name change] could only correspond to the 12 nautical miles away from the coastlines of the United States of America,” Sheinbaum said.

Google has not yet responded to the BBC’s request for comment.

But in a statement on social media on Monday it said: “We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

It will also rename Mount Denali as Mount McKinley in the US, following another order from Trump.

“When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name,” it said.

Sheinbaum has criticised Google’s decision, saying the firm should not respond to “the mandate of a country” to change the name of “an international sea”.

But she seemed to poke fun at Trump’s move by joking Mexico may demand Google make some additional renaming decisions.

“By the way, we are also going to ask for Mexican America to appear on the map,” she said.

Sheinbaum previously joked she would consider renaming North America as “América Mexicana” in the country.

“He says that he will call it the Gulf of America on its continental shelf,” Sheinbaum previously said when Trump signed the executive order.

“For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico, and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico.”

Among the numerous executive actions Trump signed in his first week in office was one to retitle the Gulf of Mexico on official US maps and federal communications.

The change in name will only appear for Google Maps users in the US.

Google also said its US app users would see North America’s highest mountain, Mount Denali, revert to its previous name of Mount McKinley, following a separate renaming push from Trump.

“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” the company said in a social media post on Monday. “We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

Google said the changes – for both Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali – will be made “quickly” once the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated.

“When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name,” the company said. “Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names. That applies here too.”

The name change appears to be of high priority for Trump, who mentioned it in his inaugural address on 20 January – just minutes after taking the oath of office.

“America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world,” Trump said at the time. “A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.”

Meanwhile, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum poked fun at Trump’s renaming decision and even initially sarcastically suggested renaming North America as “América Mexicana” or “Mexican America”.

“He says that he will call it the Gulf of America on its continental shelf,” Sheinbaum said last week. “For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico, and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico.”

0:50Watch: Mexico’s president rebukes Trump’s vow to rename Gulf of Mexico

Further north in Alaska, Trump said he will restore Mount Denali to its previous name of Mount McKinley to honour former President William McKinley who he said made the US “very rich” through tariffs and talent.

The mountain had been formally titled Denali in 2015, under President Barack Obama’s administration as a gesture to Native Americans in Alaska.

Indigenous organizations and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, have come out against Trump’s decision.

“Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial,” she said.

Google has also confirmed that it has made a similar donation as the two firms join a growing list of major American companies contributing to the fund.

The list also includes oil producer Chevron and technology giants Meta, Amazon and Uber.

Trump’s inauguration, marking the start of his second term in the White House, is set to take place on 20 January.

“We are pleased to continue Boeing’s bipartisan tradition of supporting US Presidential Inaugural Committees,” Boeing said.

The company added that it has made similar donations to each of the past three presidential inauguration funds.

Boeing is working to recover from a safety and quality control crisis, as well as dealing with the losses from a strike last year.

The company is also building the next presidential aircraft, known as Air Force One. The two jets are expected to come into service as early as next year.

During his first term as president, Trump forced the plane maker to renegotiate its contract, calling the initial deal too expensive.

Google became the latest big tech firm to donate to the fund, following similar announcements by Meta and Amazon. It also said it will stream the event around the world.

“Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage,” said Karan Bhatia, Google’s global head of government affairs and public policy.

Car companies Ford, General Motors and Toyota have also donated a $1m each to the inaugural committee.

In the energy industry, Chevron confirmed that it has made a donation to the fund but declined to say how much.

“Chevron has a long tradition of celebrating democracy by supporting the inaugural committees of both parties. We are proud to be doing so again this year,” said Bill Turene, Chevron’s manager of global media relations.

The suggestions stem from the US search giant’s ongoing antitrust battle over its online search business.

In August, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google illegally crushed its competition in search – a decision the company vowed to appeal.

In a legal filing submitted Friday, Google said it should be allowed to continue entering into those contracts with other companies while widening the options it offers.

These options include allowing different default search engines to be assigned to different platforms and browsing modes.

Google’s suggested remedies also call for the ability for partners to change their default search provider at least every 12 months.

The proposals stand in stark contrast to the sweeping remedies suggested last month by the US Department of Justice (DOJ), which recommended that Judge Mehta force the firm to stop entering into revenue-sharing contracts.

DOJ lawyers also demanded that Google sell Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser.Google’s search engine accounts for about 90% of all online searches globally, according to web traffic analysis platform Statcounter.

In a statement, Google called DOJ’s remedies “overbroad” and said even its own counterproposals, which were filed in response to a court-mandated deadline, would come at a cost to their partners.

Judge Mehta is expected to issue a decision in the remedies phase of the landmark case by August, after a trial.

The chip is the latest development in a field known as quantum computing – which is attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of mind-bogglingly powerful computer.

Google says its new quantum chip, dubbed “Willow”, incorporates key “breakthroughs” and “paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.”

However experts say Willow is, for now, a largely experimental device, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years – and billions of dollars – away.

Quantum computers work in a fundamentally different way to the computer in your phone or laptop.

They harness quantum mechanics – the strange behaviour of ultra-tiny particles – to crack problems far faster than traditional computers.

It’s hoped quantum computers might eventually be able to use that ability to vastly speed up complex processes, such as creating new medicines.

There are also fears it could be used for ill – for example to break some types of encryption used to protect sensitive data.In February Apple announced that the encryption that protects iMessage chats is being made “quantum proof” to stop them being read by powerful future quantum computers.

Hartmut Neven leads Google’s Quantum AI lab that created Willow and describes himself as the project’s “chief optimist.”

He said that Willow would be used in some practical applications – but declined, for now, to provide more detail.

But a chip able to perform commercial applications would not appear before the end of the decade, he said.

Initially these applications would be the simulation of systems where quantum effects are important.

“For example, relevant when it comes to the design of nuclear fusion reactors to understand the functioning of drugs and pharmaceutical development, it would be relevant for developing better car batteries and another long list of such tasks”.

Mr Neven said that Willow’s performance meant it was the “best quantum processor built to date”.

But Professor Alan Woodward, a computing expert at Surrey University, says quantum computers will be better at a range of tasks than current “classical” computers, but they will not replace them.

He warns against overstating the importance of Willow’s achievement in a single test.

“One has to be careful not to compare apples and oranges” he said.

Google had chosen a problem to use as a benchmark of performance that was, “tailor-made for a quantum computer” and this didn’t demonstrate “a universal speeding up when compared to classical computers”.

Nonetheless, he said Willow represented significant progress, in particular in what’s known as error correction.

In very simple terms the more useful a quantum computer is, the more qubits it has.

However a major problem with the technology is that it is prone to errors – a tendency that has previously increased the more qubits a chip has.

But Google researchers say they have reversed this and managed to engineer and program the new chip so the error rate fell across the whole system as the number of qubits increased.

It was a major “breakthrough” that cracked a key challenge that the field had pursued “for almost 30 years”, Mr Neven believes.

He said that it was comparable to “if you had an airplane with just one engine – that will work, but two engines are safer, four engines is yet safer”.

Errors are a significant obstacle in creating more powerful quantum computers and the development was “encouraging for everyone striving to build a practical quantum computer” Prof Woodward said.

But Google itself notes that to develop practically useful quantum computers the error rate will still need to go much lower than that displayed by Willow.

Willow was made in Google’s new, purpose-built manufacturing plant in California.

Countries around the world are investing in quantum computing.The UK recently launched the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).

Its director, Michael Cuthbert, said that he was wary of language that fuelled the “hype cycle” and thought Willow was more a “milestone rather than a breakthrough”.

Nevertheless, it was “clearly a highly impressive piece of work”.

Eventually quantum computers would help with a range of tasks including “logistics problems such as cargo freight distribution on aircraft or routing of telecoms signals or stored energy throughout the national grid”, he said.

And there were already 50 quantum businesses in the UK, attracting £800m in funding and employing 1300 people.

On Friday, researchers from Oxford University and Osaka University in Japan published a paper showcasing the very low error rate in a trapped-ion qubit.

Theirs is a different approach to making a quantum computer that’s capable of working at room temperature – whereas Google’s chip has to be stored at ultra low temperatures to be effective.

Scientific findings from Google’s development of Willow have been published in the journal Nature

That is the question being asked in India after three men died when their car veered off an unfinished bridge and fell on to a riverbed in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

Police are still investigating the incident, which took place on Sunday, but they believe that Google Maps led the group to take that route.

A part of the bridge had reportedly collapsed earlier this year because of floods and while locals knew this and avoided the bridge, the three men were not aware of this and were from outside the area. There were no barricades or sign boards indicating that the bridge was unfinished.

Authorities have named four engineers from the state’s road department and an unnamed official from Google Maps in a police complaint on charges of culpable homicide.

A spokesperson from Google said that it was co-operating with the investigation.

The tragic accident has spotlighted India’s poor road infrastructure and sparked a debate on whether navigation apps like Google Maps share responsibility for such incidents.

Some blame the app for not providing accurate information while others argue that it is a larger failure on the part of the government for not cordoning off the place.

Google Maps is the most popular navigation app in India and has become synonymous with GPS (Global Positioning System), a satellite-based radio navigation system.

It also powers the services of many ride-sharing, e-commerce and food delivery platforms. The app reportedly has around 60 million active users and witnesses around 50 million searches in a day.

But the app has frequently come under scrutiny for providing incorrect directions, sometimes leading to fatal accidents.

In 2021, a man from Maharashtra state drowned after he drove his car into a dam, allegedly while following directions on the app.

Last year, two young doctors in Kerala state died after they drove their car into a river. Police said that they had been following a route shown by the app and cautioned people against relying on it too much when roads were flooded.

But how does Google Maps learn about changes on a road?

GPS signals from users’ apps track traffic changes along routes – an increase signals congestion, while a decrease suggests a road is less used. The app also receives updates from governments and users about traffic jams or closures.

Complaints related to high traffic, or the ones notified by authorities are given priority, as Google does not have the manpower to deal with the millions of complaints streaming in daily, says Ashish Nair, the founder of mapping platform Potter Maps and a former Google Maps employee.

“A map operator then uses satellite imagery, Google Street View and government notifications to confirm the change and update the map.”

According to Mr Nair, navigating apps cannot be held responsible for mishaps as their terms of services make it clear that users must apply their own judgement on the road and that the information provided by the app might differ from actual conditions.

Besides, it is simply very difficult for a platform like Google, which manages maps across the world, to keep across every change that happens on a road, he adds.

Unlike other countries, India also does not have a robust system for reporting such issues on time.

“Data remains a big challenge in India. There is no system for infrastructural changes to be logged into a web interface, which can then be used by apps like Google Maps. Countries like Singapore have such a system,” Mr Nair says.

He adds that India’s vast population and fast-paced development make it even more challenging to get accurate, real-time data. “In other words, bad maps are here to stay until governments become more proactive about collecting and sharing data.”

Lawyers are divided on whether GPS apps can be held legally responsible for road accidents.

Advocate Saima Khan says that since India’s Information Technology (IT) Act gives digital platforms like Google Maps the status of an ‘intermediary’ (a platform that merely disseminates information provided by a third party) it is protected against liability.

But she adds that if it can be proven that the platform did not rectify its data despite being given correct, timely information, then it might be held liable for negligence.

In a statement, the country’s antitrust watchdog alleged Google had illegally linked two advertising tools to maintain market supremacy and used this dominant position to distort ad auctions by preferring its own tools.

The agency said it had filed an application with the Competition Tribunal, a court-like independent body, that would require Google to sell two of its ad technology tools.

In a statement Google said the complaint out of Canada “ignores the intense competition where ad buyers and sellers have plenty of choice and we look forward to making our case in court”.

“Our advertising technology tools help websites and apps fund their content, and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers,” said Dan Taylor, vice-president of global advertising.

This case centres on online web advertisements – the ads shown to users while visiting other websites.

Digital ad inventory – the space website publishers make available for sale – is often bought and sold through automated auctions using digital platforms.

These platforms are known as ad tech tools, while the entire set of tools used through the purchasing process are known as the ad tech stack.

According to the Competition Bureau, an investigation found that Google had “abused its dominant position” as the biggest ad tech stack in Canada.

“Through a series of calculated decisions, taken over the course of multiple years, Google has excluded competitors and entrenched itself at the center of online advertising,” the Competition Bureau said in its notice announcing the suit of Thursday.

“Google’s near-total control of the ad-tech [software] is a function of premeditated design and conduct, rather than superior competitive performance or happenstance.”

The agency said it was asking the Competition Tribunal to force Google to sell two of its ad tech tools, and pay a fine of as much as 3% of the company’s global revenue “to promote compliance” with Canada’s competition laws.

Google has 45 days to file its response with the tribunal.

The case comes a week after the US justice department and a group of states demanded Google sells Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser – just one of a series of remedies meant to stop the tech giant from maintaining its monopoly in online search.