Microsoft 50th Anniversary Interrupted by Pro-Palestinian Protests
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Salma Hossein
- . April 5, 2025
- . Update: April 5, 2025 4:43 pm
Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration that took place at Redmond, became a sensation on the social media due to an unforeseen internal protests against the company’s alleged involvement with the Israeli military. During the keynote speech delivered by Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO a software engineer Ibtihal Aboussad crossed over him and raised her voice by accusing the company’s involvement in Israeli’s war against Palestine and profiting with the usage of AI tools in Israel’s military. Further she underpinned the reports stating the contract signed between Israel and Microsoft & the use of technology to target the civilians in Gaza.
“All Microsoft employees have blood on their hands. How dare you all celebrate while Microsoft is killing children? Shame on you all.” said the Microsoft employee
“When I moved to the Artificial Intelligence Platforms department, I was excited to contribute to advanced AI technologies and their applications for the benefit of humanity. I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government, for the purpose of spying on and killing journalists” she added
This outburst has been sparked by the investigation undertaken by the Associated Press decoding that the AI models which were developed by Microsoft and OpenAI were used by the Israeli military to assist in identifying the bombing targets in Gaza and Lebanon. Such protest within the company exposes the ethical concerns and adds tension to its actual role in international conflicts.
