Google CEO Sundar Pichai told US Senator Mark Warner that the firm has ended some partnerships in China, the lawmaker said on Tuesday on Bloomberg Television.
The search giant’s ties to China were in the spotlight this week after technology investor Peter Thiel on Sunday suggested that the US government probe Google’s “seemingly treasonous” work.
US President Donald Trump said he wanted the US attorney general to look into the claims.
Google pulled its search engine from China in 2010, but it 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 major parties.
Earlier this year, Google said it had moved staff off of Dragonfly, and on Tuesday Google vice president of public policy and government affairs Karan Bhatia said that the project was “terminated.”
Warner did not specify what projects he discussed with Pichai.
A spokeswoman for the senator said they spoke about a “range of partnerships.”
“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.”
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on Warner’s interview.
In January last year, Google parent Alphabet Inc signed a deal with Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) to cross-license technology and intellectual property.
It was also in talks with Tencent and other Chinese companies about bringing its cloud services to China, Bloomberg News reported.
Google has a research partnership with Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
In a speech on Sunday, Thiel, a Facebook Inc board member, raised the question of whether Google’s management was “infiltrated” by foreign intelligence agencies.
On Monday, the company said it has never worked with the Chinese military.
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