A pro-Palestinian protester, Ibtihal Aboussad, escorted by security after interrupting the CEO of Microsoft in Redmond, Washington State. Photo circulating on social media.
Moroccan engineer Ibtihal Aboussad, based in Canada, was recently fired by Microsoft after publicly denouncing the tech company's involvement in Israeli military programs.
Ibtihal Aboussad interrupted Microsoft's 50th anniversary celebration on Friday in Redmond, Washington. The event was attended by iconic figures of the company, including Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer. While Microsoft's AI Director, Mustafa Suleiman, was presenting the latest innovations related to the Copilot digital assistant, the engineer stood up to denounce the company's collaboration with the Israeli army.
"Mustafa, shame on you!" she exclaimed as she approached the stage. "You claim to want to use artificial intelligence for good, but Microsoft provides technologies to the Israeli army. Fifty thousand people have perished, and Microsoft fuels this genocide in our region!"
She then threw a kuffiyeh onto the stage before being removed by security. Mustafa Suleiman briefly replied, "Thank you for your protest. I hear you."
Her intervention, filmed and widely shared on social media, drew widespread praise and led to a job offer from Kuwaiti businessman Abdallah al-Dabbous. Dabbous, founder and CEO of several companies including the online payment platform MyFatoorah, announced on Saturday in a post on X that he wanted to offer her a position.
According to documents reviewed by CNBC, Ibtihal Aboussad was fired for "cause, deliberate misconduct, insubordination or willful neglect of her duties."
"I spoke out today because after learning that my department was contributing to the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice," she wrote in an email addressed to several senior Microsoft executives.
At another event with Microsoft executives last Friday, Vaniya Agrawal interrupted a speech by CEO Satya Nadella with a similar protest and then emailed the executives. In an email reviewed by CNBC, Agrawal claims that Microsoft is "complicit" as a "manufacturer of digital weapons that fuel surveillance, apartheid, and genocide," adding, "In working for this company, we are all complicit."
According to the Health Ministry, the number of Palestinian casualties since Oct. 7, 2023, amount to over 50,500 people killed and 115,500 others injured.
An investigation by the Associated Press, published earlier this year, revealed that artificial intelligence tools developed by Microsoft and OpenAI were used in an Israeli military program aimed at selecting targets during bombings in Gaza and Lebanon.