https://www.commondreams.org/news/stanford-graduation-walk-out

‘Free Palestine!’: 200 Stanford Grads Walk Out on Google CEO’s Keynote Speech

“Today, we denied the speech of a genocidal company’s CEO,” said Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine. “We walked towards our People’s Commencement. We started imagining a better future for our education.”

BRETT WILKINS
Jun 15, 2026

Around 200 graduating students at Stanford University in California walked out of Sunday’s commencement speech by Google CEO Sundar Pichai to protest his company’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.

With graduating students across the country booing commencement speakers who mention artificial intelligence, Pichai was careful to avoid discussing the historically disruptive—and potentially apocalyptic—technology during his speech, even joking about the difficulty of doing so given his job and the fact that his name can’t be spelled without the “ai” at the end. It was an apparently wise decision, especially given a recent interview in which he opined that humans aren’t “evolved” enough to fully understand the profound technology shift AI is driving.

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Protesting students condemned Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud-computing and AI contract signed in 2021 between the Israeli government and Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The deal prohibits Google or Amazon from refusing service to the Israeli government, military, or intelligence agencies.

The Project Nimbus contract sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech’s complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine and Google’s violation of its own AI principles.

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