CALIFORNIA, U.S. - Thousands of Google employees have written a letter demanding that the search engine giant's CEO Sundar Pichai end the project for the Pentagon.

According to reports, over 3,100 Google employees have signed and circulated a letter protesting Google's involvement in Project Maven.

Project Maven is aimed at helping a Pentagon effort to use AI systems to analyze drone footage.

The letter circulated within the company demands that Google CEO Sundar Pichai pull the plug on the effort.

A report in the New York Times showed that some Google employees are not happy that the company is working with the Pentagon on an AI system that analyzes drone footage.

The letter reads, "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war."

In March this year, Google was revealed to have partnered with the Defense Department on Project Maven, which is aimed at building AI systems that can process and analyze countless hours of video footage taken from aerial drones.

Further, reports also revealed that Project Maven intends to tap computer vision technology, which can be used to identify objects and faces in digital images. 

Reports had also revealed that Google is among several companies developing the tech for things like image search and photo labeling. 

However, the same technology holds promise for the military and the first goal of Project Maven is to help the U.S. defeat the terrorist group ISIS by identifying targets in drone footage.

So far, however, the exact contribution that Google is making in this project remains unclear.

The company said in a brief statement that its efforts are focused on "non-offensive purposes" and involve its open-source object recognition technology, which is available to any Google Cloud customer.

Further, Google stated, "The (computing) models are based on unclassified data only. The technology is used to flag images for human review and is intended to save lives and save people from having to do highly tedious work."

However, employees have argued in the letter that the Pentagon could one day weaponize the company's contributions into flying a drone or launching an attack.

Employees said in the letter, "We cannot outsource the moral responsibility of our technologies to third parties."

The letter also warned that Google's involvement in military research could tarnish the search giant's reputation and drive talent away. 

It said, "The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also participating doesn't make this any less risky for Google. Google's unique history, its motto Don't Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users set it apart."

In a statement, Google said that it welcomed the employee discussions about the technologies and explained, "Any military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns."