On the recent Israeli protests against Microsoft and the use of AI in the development of the [Windows 95] project: Microsoft’s failure to show Israel’s war crimes are powered by Azure

A number of events were disrupted earlier this week during Microsoft’s developer conference. Nadella was interrupted by Microsoft employee Joe Lopez who said, “How about you show Israeli war crimes that are powered by Azure?” The following day, a protester described only as a “Palestinian tech worker” disrupted another executive’s presentation. On Wednesday, protesters disrupted the third session and in the commotion, Microsoft inadvertently revealed internal messages about Walmart.

This latest protest comes less than a week after Microsoft announced that it had conducted an internal review and used an unnamed external firm to assess how its technology was used in the war in Gaza. Microsoft says that its relationship with Israel’s Ministry of Defense (IMOD) is “structured as a standard commercial relationship” and that it has “found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people or that IMOD has failed to comply with our terms of service or our AI Code of Conduct.”

Nasr was one of the two protesters that were former Microsoft employees. During the 50th anniversary event of Microsoft last month, Narayan Agrawal interrupted the company’s co-founders Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. The email shows that Agrawal was dismissed at Microsoft just before the protest began.

“I gladly took on the [Windows 95] project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company,” Eno wrote on Instagram. “I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.”