AhlulBayt News Agency: The Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has expressed admiration for a Microsoft employee’s daring interruption during the tech giant’s 50th-anniversary celebration, where she called out the company’s AI support for the Israeli military's genocidal war in the Gaza Strip.
“Hamas highly commends the heroic stance of engineer Ibtihal Aboussad, who courageously and at great sacrifice exposed the complicity of major global technology companies with the Zionist regime’s killing machine in an exceptional manner,” the group said in a statement on Saturday.
Various reports have indicated that tech companies, including Microsoft, have provided the Israeli occupation forces with artificial intelligence tools employed in the ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, where close to 50,700 Palestinians have been killed.
It appealed to all employees and personnel of companies with a relationship with the Israeli military to follow suit and adopt a position similar to that of Aboussad.
“We also demand the UN, the international community, and rights groups to document all forms of technological complicity with the occupying Israeli regime’s crimes, prosecute these companies before international courts, and impose immediate sanctions on them for violating laws and human ethics,” Hamas stated.
The protest started on Friday as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman was unveiling product updates and a long-term vision for the company’s AI assistant product, Copilot, to an audience that included prominent figures such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer.
“Mustafa, shame on you,” shouted Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad as she walked toward the stage, prompting Suleyman to pause his speech.
“You are a war profiteer. Stop using AI for genocide,” she added.
“You claim that you care about 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.”
Later on, a second Microsoft employee, Vaniya Agrawal, interrupted the celebration in Redmond, Washington, during which Gates, Ballmer, and current CEO Satya Nadella were on stage – the first public gathering since 2014 of the three men who have been Microsoft’s CEO.
Some employees also rallied outside the event.
Earlier this year, +972 Magazine found that Microsoft has a “footprint” in the Israeli military’s offensives, with its cloud and artificial intelligence services seeing a massive surge in sales to the Israeli army since the genocidal war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023.
The tech giant reportedly has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures” in the Israeli-occupied territories.
An investigation by the Associated Press in February also revealed that AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI were utilized in an Israeli military program to help select bombing targets during the recent onslaughts on Gaza and Lebanon.
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