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At MicrosoftThe celebration of the 50th anniversary on Friday, a software engineer at the company’s artificial intelligence department, interrupted the event with a message: Stop allowing Israeli military to use Microsoft’s AI products.
At that time, Microsoft AI Executive Director Mustafa Suleiman was speaking.
“Mustafa, ashamed of you,” said the employee, Ithal Abusdad, said as she went to the scene of the event in Redmond, Washington. “You claim to be taking care of the use of AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to Israeli military. Fifty thousand people have died and Microsoft feeds this genocide in our region.”
Suleiman replied, recognizing the protester.
Abusad continued: “A shame for you. You are a profile of the war. Stop using AI for genocide, mustafa. Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands. The whole Microsoft has blood on your hands.”
The employee working on the Microsoft AI team to recognize speech was quickly accompanied.
Shortly after the interruption, Aboussad sent an email viewed by CNBC, Suleyman and other Microsoft leaders, including CEO Satya nadelFinance Chief Amy Hood, operating initial Carolina Dibek Hap and Brad Smith, president of the company.
“I spoke today because after learning that my organ is feeding the genocide of my people in Palestine, I did not see any other moral choice,” Abussad wrote in the email. “This is especially true when I witnessed how Microsoft tried to quell and suppress any disagreement from my colleagues who tried to raise this issue. In the last year and a half, our Arabic, Palestinian and Muslim community in Microsa is silent, frightened.
A Microsoft spokesman said the company is committed to adhering to the highest standards of business practices.
“We provide many paths for all the votes that will be heard. The important thing is that we ask this to do this in a way that does not cause a break in the business. If this happens, we ask the participants to move,” the spokesman said.
AI companies in recent months have been prohibited on military use of their products and have made deals with giants from the defense industry and the Ministry of Defense.
In November Anthrop and Defense Performer Palants announce a partnership with Amazon Web services for providing US intelligence and defense agencies access to models of Anthropic Claude AI. Palantir recently signed a new five -year deal worth up to $ 100 million to expand US military access to its Maven Ai Warfare program.
Openai and Anduril have announced a partnership that allows the technology company Defense to implement advanced AI National Security Missions Systems. And last monthScale AI has made a deal with the Ministry of Defense for a multimillion -leading AI Agent program.
Aboussad wrote in the email that after working on Microsoft’s AI platforms, she was excited to contribute to “avant -garde AI technology and its applications for the good of humanity.” But she wrote, “I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to Israeli military and governments.”
“I didn’t register to write a code that violates human rights,” Abussad wrote, adding a connection to A “Apartheid“Petition.
At a separate Microsoft event with leaders on the same day, another software engineer Vanya Agraval interrupted a speech from Nadeel with a similar protest.
Then Agraval wrote in an email to the executives that he would resign from the company.
“You may have seen me stand up today to call Satya during his speech on the 50th anniversary of Microsoft,” she wrote in the email, which was viewed by CNBC. “In the last 1.5 years, I have become more aware of the growing role of Microsoft in the military-industrial complex.”
Agrawal said Microsoft is a “complicit” as “a digital weapons manufacturer that supplies observation, apartheid and genocide.”
She added that “working for this company, we are all complicit.”
“Even if we do not work directly in AI or Azure, our labor is silent support, and our corporate climb only nourishes the system,” Agrawal writes. She included an action call to sign the same PetitionS
