Microsoft birthday celebration interrupted by employees protesting use of AI by Israeli military

At Microsoft's 50th anniversary celebration on Friday, a software engineer in the company's artificial intelligence division interrupted the event with a message: Stop allowing the Israeli military to use Microsoft's AI products.

At the time, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman was delivering a speech.

"Mustafa, shame on you," the employee, Ibtihal Aboussad, said as she walked towards the stage at the event in Redmond, Washington. "You claim that you care for using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty thousand people have died, and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region."

Suleyman responded, acknowledging the protester.

Aboussad continued, "Shame on you. You are a war profiteer. Stop using AI for genocide, Mustafa. Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands. All of Microsoft has blood on its hands."

The employee, who works on Microsoft AI's speech recognition engine team, was swiftly escorted out.

Shortly after the interruption, Aboussad sent an email, which was viewed by CNBC, to Suleyman and other Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, finance chief Amy Hood, operating chief Carolina Dybeck Happe and Brad Smith, the company's president.

"I spoke up today because after learning that my org was powering the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice," Aboussad wrote in the email. "This is especially true when I've witnessed how Microsoft has tried to quell and suppress any dissent from my coworkers who tried to raise this issue. For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil."

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company is committed to adhering to the highest standards of business practices.

"We provide many avenues for all voices to be heard. Importantly, we ask that this be done in a way that does not cause a business disruption. If that happens, we ask participants to relocate," the spokesperson said.

AI companies in recent months have been walking back bans on military use of their products and entering into deals with defense industry giants and the Defense Department.

In November, Anthropic and defense contractor Palantir announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Anthropic's Claude AI models. Palantir recently signed a new five-year deal worth up to $100 million to expand U.S. military access to its Maven AI warfare program.

OpenAI and Anduril announced a partnership allowing the defense tech company to deploy advanced AI systems for "national security missions." And last month, Scale AI forged a deal with the Department of Defense for a multimillion-dollar flagship AI agent program.

Aboussad wrote in the email that after she started working on Microsoft's AI platforms, she was excited to contribute to "cutting-edge AI technology and its applications for the good of humanity." But, she wrote, "I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government."

"I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights," Aboussad wrote, adding a link to a "No Azure for Apartheid" petition.

At a separate Microsoft event with executives on the same day, another software engineer, Vaniya Agrawal, interrupted a speech from Nadella with a similar protest.

Agrawal then wrote in an email to executives that she would resign from the company.

"You may have seen me stand up earlier today to call out Satya during his speech at the Microsoft 50th anniversary," she wrote in the email, which was viewed by CNBC. "Over the past 1.5 years, I've grown more aware of Microsoft's growing role in the military-industrial complex."

Agrawal said Microsoft is "complicit" as a "digital weapons manufacturer that powers surveillance, apartheid, and genocide."

She added that, "by working for this company, we are all complicit."

"Even if we don't work directly in AI or Azure, our labor is tacit support, and our corporate climb only fuels the system," Agrawal wrote. She included a call to action to sign the same petition.

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