Fifty thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered with Microsoft technology, employee says

Several employees disrupted Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event in Washington on Friday, protesting the company’s AI products being used by the Zionist occupation during its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

“You are a war profiteer. Stop using AI for genocide,” software engineer Ibithal Aboussad, who works on the artificial intelligence speech recognition engine team, said at the event in Redmond, Washington, during AI CEO Mustafa Sulleyman’s speech on the company’s artificial intelligence assistant product.

“You claim that you care for using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military,” Aboussad said, adding, “Fifty thousand people have died, and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region.”

“Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands. All of Microsoft has blood on its hands,” she added.

At a separate event Friday with Sulleyman and former CEOs Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, another employee interrupted their conversation to protest the genocide committed by the Zionist occupation.

“Shame on you all. You’re all hypocrites,” shouted Vaniya Agrawal, another software engineer in the AI division, before she was taken out of the room.

“Fifty thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered with Microsoft technology,” she said. “How dare you. Shame on all of you for celebrating on their blood. Cut ties with Israel.”

Agrawal wrote an email to Microsoft executives after she interrupted the celebration, indicating that she would resign, according to CNBC.

“By working for this company, we are all complicit,” said Agrawal.

An investigation by The Associated Press revealed earlier this year that AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI were used as part of an “Israeli military program” to select bombing targets during its wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

In recent months, several AI companies have reversed their stance on banning military use of their products, entering into partnerships with the U.S. Department of Defense and defense industry firms.

According to CNBC, Aboussad emailed Microsoft executives after the event, expressing that she was not informed her work would be used for military purposes.

“I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government,” wrote Aboussad. “I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights.”

The Zionist occupation’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its ongoing genocidal war on the Gaza Strip is raising serious questions about the complicity of tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon in war crimes.

According to Anadolu news agency, multiple reports have confirmed that “Israel” has deployed AI models such as Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy? to conduct mass surveillance, identify targets, and direct strikes against tens of thousands of individuals in Gaza – often in their own homes – all with minimal human oversight.

Rights groups and experts say these systems have played a critical role in “Israel’s” incessant and apparently indiscriminate attacks, which have laid waste to massive swaths of the besieged enclave and killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, the source said.

“With the explicit use of AI models that we know lack precision accuracy, we are only going to see the normalization of mass civilian casualties, as we have kind of seen with Gaza,” Heidy Khlaaf, a former systems safety engineer at OpenAI, told Anadolu.

Khlaaf also confirmed that major US-based tech firms are directly involved in supplying AI and cloud computing capabilities to the occupation forces.

“This is not a new trend,” she noted, recalling that Google has been providing AI and cloud services to the “Israeli military” since 2021 through its $1.2 billion Project Nimbus, alongside Amazon.

Microsoft’s involvement also deepened after October 2023, as “Israel” relied more on its cloud computing services, AI models, and technical support, she said.

The Zionist occupation’s genocidal war on Gaza has resulted in at least 50,609 Palestinian martyrs and 115,063 wounded, according to the Health Ministry. The Government Media Office updated its death toll to more than 61,700, saying thousands of people missing under the rubble are presumed dead.