Google will not renew a contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work when a current deal expires next year, a senior company executive told employees at a meeting Friday.

Diane Greene, who is the head of the Google Cloud business that won a contract with the Pentagon’s Project Maven, told employees during a weekly meeting that the company was backing away from the AI work with the military, according to a person familiar with the discussion but not permitted to speak publicly about it. Greene’s comments were reported earlier by Gizmodo.

Google’s decision to work with the Defense Department on the Maven program, which uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes, roiled the internet giant’s workforce. Many of the company’s top AI researchers, in particular, worried that the military contract was the first step toward using the nascent technology for lethal purposes.

Many tech outfits have sought military business without upsetting their employees. It is not unusual for Silicon Valley’s big companies to have deep military ties. But Google’s roots and self-image are different. A number of its top technical talent said Google was betraying its idealistic principles, while the company’s business-minded officials worried that the protests would damage its chances to secure more business from the Defense Department.

About 4,000 Google employees signed a petition demanding “a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.” A handful of employees resigned in protest, while some were openly advocating for the company to cancel the contract with the military.

The money for Google in the Project Maven contract was never large by the standards of a company with revenue of $110 billion last year — $9 million, one official told employees, or a possible $15 million over 18 months, according to an internal email.

But some company officials saw it as opening a path to much greater revenue down the road, as the Pentagon fully embraces artificial intelligence. In an email last September, a Google official in Washington told colleagues she expected Maven to grow into a $250 million-a-year project, and eventually it could have helped open the door to contracts worth far more; notably a multiyear, multibillion-dollar cloud computing project called JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure.

Whether the Maven decision is a short-term reaction to employee protests and adverse news coverage or reflects a more sweeping strategy not to pursue military work for Google is unclear. The question of whether a particular contract contributes to warfare does not always have a simple answer.

When the Maven work came under fire inside Google, company officials asserted that it was not “offensive” in nature. But Maven is using the company’s AI software to improve the sorting and analysis of imagery from drones, and some drones rely on such analysis to identify human targets for lethal missile shots.

Google management had told employees that it would produce a set of principles to guide its choices in the use of AI for defense and intelligence contracting.

At Friday’s meeting, Greene said the company was expected to announce those guidelines next week. Google has already said that the new artificial intelligence principles under development precluded the use of AI in weaponry. It was unclear how such a prohibition would be applied in practice and whether it would affect Google’s pursuit of the JEDI contract.

Defense Department officials are themselves wrestling with the complexity of their move into cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Critics have questioned the proposal to give the entire JEDI contract, which could extend for 10 years, to a single vendor, and this week, officials announced they were slowing down the contracting process.

Dana White, the Pentagon spokeswoman, said this week the JEDI contract has drawn “incredible interest” and more than 1,000 responses to a draft request for proposals. But she said officials wanted to take their time.

“So, we are working on it, but it’s important that we don’t rush toward failure,” White said. “This is different for us. We have a lot more players in it. This is something different from some of our other acquisition programs because we do have a great deal of commercial interest.”