Increasingly angry Google employees on its projects in China

In the face of censorship and cyberattacks, the Californian giant withdrew its search engine from China in 2010 and many of its services have since been stuck in the world's second-largest economy.

Thursday, a Google employee had confirmed to AFP that the company was testing a search engine compliant with the requirements of the Chinese authorities, much to the chagrin of human rights activists and employees.

According to the Intercept online magazine on Friday, citing internal sources, the group has closed most employees' access to documents related to the "Dragonfly" project after leaks in the press.

"There was a total radio silence from the hierarchy, which makes a lot of people unhappy and scared ..." says an anonymous employee, saying that their internal discussion forums talk a lot about the subject and that people are "furious" ".

Contacted by AFP, Google has not responded immediately.

This is not the first time that Google is facing this situation.

Thousands of employees had signed a petition a few months ago asking him to "stay out of the war business" about a deal with the Pentagon.

Following this sling, the group had committed in early June that its work on artificial intelligence (AI) is never used to make weapons.

In addition, according to the Bloomberg agency on Friday, Google is in discussions with the Tencent group and other Chinese groups to be able to offer its cloud services in this country, by running them on "data centers" and servers. Chinese companies, to comply with the requirements of China, which wants the data to be stored on its soil.

Having no "data centers" in mainland China, Google must establish partnerships, explains the financial news agency.