Microsoft Secretly Selling AI to Fossil Fuel Companies While Bragging About Environmental Progress

All while claiming the company will be "carbon negative" by 2030.

Pitch Dreck

While projecting an image of sustainability, Microsoft has secretly been selling bespoke AI services to fossil fuel giants and claiming it can help them make even more money while killing the climate.

As The Atlantic's Karen Hao reports, whistleblowers say that the tech giant has been pitching all manner of wild promises to oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron — and working to hide that fact from the public.

After reviewing troves of documents and speaking to dozens of former and current Microsoft employees, Hao found that Microsoft is providing oil companies with AI algorithms designed to help them "maximize" their potential by predicting where best to drill.

In a 2022 pitch deck the reporter acquired, for instance, Microsoft claimed that its AI tools could help ExxonMobil increase its annual revenue by $1.4 billion. Of that figure, $600 million of that slated revenue would come from so-called "sustainable production," which purportedly allows for fossil fuel drilling that uses less energy.

While making these lofty pitches, the AI-bullish tech monstrosity also ambitiously pledged since 2020 to become "carbon negative" by the year 2030, and has since championed its AI as being a driving force for sustainability. Announcements of Microsoft's partnerships with oil and gas companies since have left out that the tech giant is helping some of these polluters streamline their drilling processes.

Neg Off

Microsoft repeatedly insisted that its goal of corporate carbon negativity is not at odds with the work its oil and gas clients do because its algorithms supposedly help them drill more efficiently. As Hao notes, the claim that Microsoft's AI can help increase production while reducing emissions became something of a mantra in company materials and interviews with the tech corporation and its clients.

Obviously, that logic is flawed: one cannot claim to be a climate champion while also helping oil companies drill for finite combustible resources that are very plainly destroying the planet, regardless of what greenwashing talking points Microsoft's salespeople use.

Indeed, some employees, including an environmentalist ex-Microsofter who now lobbies against her former employer, suggested to Hao that the idea was preposterous.

"All of Microsoft’s public statements and publications paint a beautiful picture of the uses of AI for sustainability," Holly Alpine, a former Microsoft sustainability program manager who left the company earlier this year after nearly a decade, told The Atlantic. "But this focus on the positives is hiding the whole story, which is much darker."

After pushing back against the company's tacit support for fossil fuel extraction for years, Alpine eventually became disillusioned enough to leave the software giant.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has "not committed to a timeline" to cutting ties with its oil clients, according to a spokesperson who spoke with The Atlantic.

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