Another titan of industry’s commencement speech was not well received by the graduates. Google is once again the company associated with the speaker, but this time it’s not artificial intelligence, but the company’s involvement with Israel.
According to Erin Woo, Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s speech protested marching with the slogans “free, free, Palestine” and “Shame on you”.
More than 100 Stanford students chanted “Free, free Palestine” as they walked out of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s speech at Stanford. Google has a cloud contract with the Israeli government. Lots of smiles and shouts of “shame on you” too pic.twitter.com/2dIqs1SBvi
— Erin Woo (@erinkwoo) June 14, 2026
In a video from the ceremony, dozens of graduates (“more than 100 by Wu’s estimate”) march toward the exit as Pichai continues his speech. This part of the speech does not touch on any sensitive or controversial material – giving the impression that it is not spontaneous. In fact, jtaken from the transcript of the speechit seems that Pichay started talking.
Google and Amazon “have a joint agreement called”Project Nimbus” The value of the contract with the Israeli army and government is reported to be 1.2 billion dollars 4 billion shekels according to Israel—and Israel in cloud computing, advanced AI, and more. provides with Reports on the factual details of Project Nimbus mainly caused by leaks. The Electronic Frontier Fund criticized the companies for their own reasons alleged lack of transparency Around Project Nimbus.
One of Pichai’s predecessors, Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was loudly booed About a month ago during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona. When Schmidt touched on AI, there was an outcry, and I wrote at the time that Schmidt couldn’t read the room. This appears to have been the case, but later reports revealed that some of the hype was premeditated. Schmidt was therefore already a controversial speaker Possible links to Jeffrey Epsteinand some violations reported “The Epstein files! The Epstein files!”
In at least one photographStanford graduates held up painted banners. One of them refers to ICE. In February, 900 Google employees called for transparency about Google’s ties to the federal government amid concerns that its technology was aiding the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown.
Booing commencement speakers have garnered a lot of media attention this graduation season. Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield and music executive Scott Borchetta They were booed again this year, but in those cases the crowd hostility was a reaction to their AI defense.
