Google's Indian American CEO Sundar Pichai has denied the company has links to China's military and said it had  only a “handful of people” in China working on open-source artificial intelligence project.

During a House of Representatives Anti-trust Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, two Republican members of the House criticised Google's withdrawal from an artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon in 2018 after about 4,000 employees of the tech giant demanded that it not get involved in military programmes.

In one of the harshest ideological attacks on Google during the hearing, the representatives, Matt Gaetz and Ken Buck, accused the company of helping China's military. Pichai said denied that Google worked with China's military. “It is absolutely false,” he said.

The Chinese government has banned Google.

Gaetz quoted Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal who sits on the board of Facebook as saying that “Google's activities with China are treasonous.”

He said that a Chinese Academy of Sciences paper claimed that Google had “enhanced the targeting capabilities” of Chinese fighter J-20 and that former chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford had said that the company “is directly aiding the Chinese military.”

Pichai denied that Google had done anything to help China's military and that he had met Dunford to clarify Google's activities in China.

He said that Google had only a “handful of people” in China working on open source artificial intelligence. project

Gaetz ended that segment of questioning saying, “When the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff says that an American company is directly aiding China, when you're working with universities (with Chinese military links) and when your employees are talking about China 'trembling the world,' it seems to call into question your commitment to our country and values.”

The comment about commitment to the US and values was a deeply disturbing personal comment aimed at Pichai for the activities of Google employees.