They are refusing to work with the U.S. military yet cooperating with China to help advance their AI technology. In some sense, this could be seen as leaving your own in the dust while helping "others".

Google refused to work on the machine vision for U.S. military drones that kill thousands of people (project maven). [1] Google's work in China is building an AI center to promote AI in general. [2]

These are not the same things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_arms_r...

[2] http://fortune.com/2017/12/13/google-china-artificial-intell...

Is Google's AI work in China public though? If that's not the case, I see Dunford's point.

The DoD does not have a unit in Deepmind ensuring all of their findings are evaluated for potential military usage as far as I know. Whereas that's certainly going to happening in any Google AI lab on China.

Not sure, though if we are speculating, it's most likely a talent acquisition move for recruiting the best data scientists in China, rather than some conspiracy to help the Chinese military.

When they're all the same bucket...

which would be then used by the Chinese military to work on the machine vision for Chinese military drones that kill thousands of people.

Where are Chinese military drones killing thousands of people? That's Nato's prerogative

Do you have evidence of this cooperation? Most stuff I've seen recently around cooperation between China and Google has been in creating a censored version of their search engine.

Google are not refusing. It is some of their employees that are resistant. The moment there is downturn in the job market the corporation will deal with them and resume working with USG