Microsoft has dismissed two workers who disrupted the company’s 50th-anniversary celebration to protest its work providing artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli military, a group representing the workers said.
Microsoft has dismissed two workers who disrupted the company’s 50th-anniversary celebration to protest its work providing artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli military, a group representing the workers said.
Microsoft charged one of the employees in a firing letter Monday with misconduct “aimed at creating notoriety and maximum disruption to this much-awaited event.” Microsoft reports that the other employee had already tendered her resignation, but on Monday, it instructed her to depart five days ahead of schedule.
The demonstrations started Friday when Microsoft software engineer Ibtihal Aboussad approached a stage where an executive was unveiling new product features and a long-term vision for Microsoft’s AI goals. You say you care about applying AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military,” Aboussad yelled at Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. “Fifty-thousand people have died, and Microsoft drives this genocide in our region.”
The protest compelled Suleyman to interrupt his speech while being live-streamed from Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus. Among the guests at the 50th anniversary of Microsoft’s founding were former CEO Steve Ballmer and co-founder Bill Gates.
Microsoft reported that Suleyman attempted to defuse the situation calmly. “Thank you for your protest. I hear you,” he said. Aboussad went on, yelling that Suleyman and “all of Microsoft” had blood on their hands. She also tossed onto the stage a keffiyeh scarf, which has become a symbol of solidarity with Palestinian people, before being removed from the event.
A second demonstrator, Microsoft employee Vaniya Agrawal, disrupted a subsequent segment of the event. Aboussad, who works out of Microsoft’s Toronto-based Canadian headquarters, was summoned on Monday to a conference call with a human resources official in which she was informed she was being let go effective immediately, according to No Azure for Apartheid, an advocacy group that has organized protests against Microsoft’s sale of its Azure cloud computing platform to Israel.
A probe by The Associated Press earlier this year found that AI models developed by Microsoft and OpenAI had been utilized as part of an Israeli military initiative to choose bombing targets in the recent Gaza and Lebanon wars. The report also included information about a mistaken Israeli airstrike in 2023 that hit a car carrying members of a Lebanese family, killing three young girls and their grandmother.
