Microsoft fires engineers over protesting AI supply to Zionist occupation amid ongoing genocide in Gaza
US tech giant Microsoft has fired two software engineers who protested the company’s AI technology supply to the Zionist occupation forces amid their ongoing genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, which by far claimed the lives of at least 50,695 Palestinians and injured 115,338 others.
Microsoft accused Ibtihal Aboussad, a software engineer in Microsoft’s AI division, of “wilful misconduct, disobedience, or neglect of duty.” Meanwhile, Vaniya Agrawal, another engineer, had planned to resign on April 11, but the company made her resignation effective immediately on Monday, according to CNBC.
The protests began on Friday when Aboussad, during the company’s 50th-anniversary event, interrupted AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s presentation, shouting that Microsoft has been enabling the “Israeli military” with AI weapons.
“You claim that you care about using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military,” Aboussad said, adding that “fifty thousand people have died, and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region.”
Later, Agrawal disrupted a separate panel featuring CEO Satya Nadella, former CEO Steve Ballmer, and founder Bill Gates, shouting: “Shame on all of you. … Cut ties with Israel.”
Aboussad, based at Microsoft’s Canadian headquarters in Toronto, was invited on Monday to a call with a human resources representative, at which she was told she was being fired immediately, according to the advocacy group No Azure for Apartheid, which has protested the sale of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform to “Israel.”
Moreover, Agrawal expressed her concerns in an email, criticizing Microsoft’s involvement in the military-industrial complex, saying that the company is “complicit” in supporting surveillance, apartheid, and genocide.
The protests of Agrawal and Aboussad were the most public but not the first over Microsoft’s work with the Zionist occupation. In February, five Microsoft employees were ejected from a meeting with CEO Satya Nadella for protesting the contracts.
Pro-Palestine Google workers were not spared from the crackdown, as dozens of them were fired last year after internal protests over a contract the company signed with the Zionist occupation. Employee sit-ins at Google offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, targeted a $1.2 billion deal known as Project Nimbus, providing AI technology to the Zionist occupation.
An investigation by The Associated Press revealed earlier this year that AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI had been used as part of an “Israeli military program” to select bombing targets during the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. The story also contained details of an “Israeli” airstrike in 2023 that struck a vehicle carrying members of a Lebanese family, killing three young girls and their grandmother.
Separately, at least 19 Palestinians were martyred early on Tuesday in a renewed attack by the Zionist occupation forces across the besieged enclave.
Ahmed Mansour, a journalist who suffered severe burns in Monday’s attack on a media tent near Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, has died of his wounds, taking the toll from that assault to at least three.
The Government Media Office updated its death toll to more than 61,700, saying thousands of people missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
