More than 200 Stanford graduates walked out of their commencement ceremony on Sunday as Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage to deliver a speech. Others in the audience booed the tech executive, turning what is typically a celebratory moment into a public protest over the company’s defense contracts.
Why students walked out on Pichai
The protest centered on Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud and AI contract with the Israeli military that it shares with Amazon. Students also objected to Google’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Signs carried by demonstrators included phrases like “ICE SPIES WITH GOOGLE AI” and “GENOCIDE RUNS ON GOOGLE,” according to a press release linked to the event. Video posted online shows students waving Palestinian flags and chanting “free Palestine.”
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“We are walking out because we refuse to glorify the corporations that fuel this violence and exercise our power to choose differently,” a statement associated with the protest reads.
Campus groups organized the walkout
The demonstration was coordinated by Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine, No Tech for Apartheid, and Tech for Liberation. A request for comment from Google was not immediately returned.
Dissent over Project Nimbus has simmered inside Google for more than a year. In 2024, the company fired 28 workers who protested the contract. Internal opposition has continued since then. The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently accused Google and other tech firms of “choosing to look the other way” on how Israel uses their services.
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Microsoft has also faced criticism for its support of the Israeli military. After an investigation found its cloud services were being used for mass surveillance of Palestinians, the company restricted the Israeli government’s use of its technology.
Backlash against the protest
The student walkout drew sharp criticism from some business leaders. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a prominent venture capitalist, posted on X that the protest was “biased, idiotic, short-sighted and very selfish.” He added that the students “ignored the bottom 3 billion people on this planet that could benefit from AI.”
Pichai, who earned his graduate degree in materials science and engineering at Stanford, was not the only commencement speaker to face student anger this year. College graduation ceremonies around the country have seen speakers booed when they tried to talk up artificial intelligence. But the Stanford walkout was unusually specific—directed not at AI hype in general but at the actual business choices Google has made under his leadership.
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Polls and surveys increasingly show that young adults worry AI will hurt their job prospects and harm other parts of society. That broader unease may have fed into the protest, even if the immediate trigger was Google’s defense contracts.
The walkout involved roughly 200 students from a graduating class of several thousand, according to reports. It was loud but did not stop Pichai from finishing his speech. He did not acknowledge the disruption while on stage, video shows.
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