DayofPal– Microsoft has terminated software engineer Ibtihal Aboussad following a public protest against the company’s provision of artificial intelligence technologies to the Israeli military. CNBC reported the dismissal on Monday, citing internal corporate communications.
Aboussad, who was based in Microsoft’s AI division in Canada, staged the protest during a company 50th anniversary last Friday. She directly confronted Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, accusing the tech giant of aiding war crimes.
“You claim to care about using AI for good,” she said, “but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty thousand people have died, and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region.”
Security personnel forcibly removed her from the venue as she continued to denounce Suleyman and Microsoft as “war profiteers.”
Shortly after the incident, Aboussad sent an email to top Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella. “I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights,” she wrote, attaching a petition titled No Azure for Apartheid, which calls on Microsoft to end its cooperation with Israeli defense ministry.
Microsoft dismissed her actions as “willful misconduct,” stating that her termination was “the only appropriate response.”
The protest was not isolated. At a separate company anniversary event on the same day, another engineer, Vaniya Agrawal, publicly criticized Microsoft’s defense partnerships. Though she had planned to resign the following week, Microsoft expedited her termination, alleging she had caused “disruption.”
In her remarks, Agrawal asserted that Microsoft had evolved into a “digital weapons manufacturer that powers surveillance, apartheid, and genocide,” adding, “By working for this company, we are all complicit.”
These internal dissenters have thrown a stark spotlight on Microsoft’s growing entanglement with the Israeli military, as the company commemorates its 50th anniversary.
Independent investigations and media reports have uncovered significant contributions by Microsoft to Israel’s military infrastructure:
According to Data Center Dynamics, Microsoft has provided approximately $10 million in cloud computing and storage services to the Israeli army, including its air force, navy, and intelligence sectors, primarily through the Azure platform.
Reporting by Anadolu Agency reveals that Microsoft has supplied the Israeli military with advanced language services, such as translation tools, speech-to-text capabilities, and automated document analysis.
Israeli consumption of Azure’s AI services surged sevenfold in October 2023. By March 2024, usage had increased by a staggering 6,300% compared to pre-war levels.
Microsoft has also enabled Israel’s defense forces to utilize cutting-edge AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, for data analysis and target identification. This usage reportedly increased twentyfold in early 2024.
As The Guardian reported, Israel has also paid Microsoft millions of dollars for 19,000 hours of engineering training meeting between October 2023 and June 2024 to develop custom AI applications. Internal communications allegedly referred to some Microsoft staff as “members of Israel’s Unit 8200,” the military’s elite cyber-intelligence division.
Human rights organizations have accused Microsoft of complicity in crimes against humanity, warning that its technology is being weaponized in the commission of genocide.
The dismissals of Aboussad and Agrawal have sparked widespread concern among digital rights advocates and have intensified scrutiny of the ethical dimensions of corporate AI deployment in wars.
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