Over the weekend, Google CEO Sundar Pichai faced a minor riot when he delivered the commencement address at Stanford University, where he earned his master’s degree in materials science and engineering. About 200 students from the graduating class reported left, while the others loudly booed the tech executive.
The focus of the protest was Google’s defense ties, including Project Nimbus, a controversial $1.2 billion contract shared with Amazon to provide cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli military. his connection With the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Student placards included phrases such as “ICE SPIES WITH GOOGLE AI” and “GENOCIDE WORKS ON GOOGLE”, as well as “FREE FREE PALESTINE” in a press release linked to the protest notes. The students also waved Palestinian flags and shouted “free Palestine”. online video protest demonstration.
“We are walking out because we refuse to glorify the corporations that fuel this violence and refuse to exercise our power to choose differently,” a statement on the protest said.
The walkout was organized by several campus activist groups, including Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine, No Tech for Apartheid, and Tech for Liberation. TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
As the war in Gaza escalated, Google’s involvement in Nimbus drew protests from both inside and outside the company. Google in 2024 He fired 28 employees because he objected to the contract even though it continued suffers from internal contradictions on the issue since then. It was also recently criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who accuses him and other companies that “choose to look the other way” to Israel’s use of their services.
Project Nimbus also gets support from Amazon. Microsoft, though, has also been criticized for its support of the Israeli army Restricted use by the Israeli government then its technology investigation found that its cloud services were being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians.
The student protest also drew criticism from business leaders on the Internet. Vinod Khosla, billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, Posted in X adding that the protest was “biased, silly, short-sighted and very selfish” and that the students “ignore the bottom 3 billion people on this planet who could benefit from AI and are selfish because they are concerned about their misinformed selfish self-interest”.
Pichai’s appearance at Stanford is part of a larger pattern. Speakers at college graduation ceremonies across the country they have faced turmoil when trying to get college students interested in artificial intelligence. But rarely, as with Pichai, has student hostility focused on specific business decisions made by the company he leads, rather than AI hype. In general, young people believe that AI exists threatens their employment opportunities and can destroy other parts of society.
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