Pro-Palestine protesters interrupts Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman at event

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's head of artificial intelligence, was interrupted on Friday by a protester who criticised the company for having contracts with the Israeli military.

Videos posted on social media show Mr Suleyman's speech coming to a halt as a woman in the audience shouts that he is a war profiteer.

“Stop using AI for genocide, Mustafa. Stop using AI for genocide in our region … 50,000 people have died. You have blood on your hands,” said the protester at the event on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington state.

“All of Microsoft has blood on its hands. How dare you all celebrate when Microsoft is killing children? Shame on you all.”

“Thank you for your protest I hear you, I hear your protest,” Mr Suleyman responded while the demonstrator was escorted from the event, which celebrated Microsoft's 50th anniversary.

Another demonstrator, Vaniya Agrawal, later interrupted a session at the event featuring Microsoft founder Bill Gates, current chief executive Satya Nadella and former chief executive Steve Ballmer.

According to an email from the group which organised the demonstrations, No Azure for Apartheid, the protester who confronted Mr Suleyman was Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad, who later sent an email to colleagues and referenced the ongoing Israel-Gaza war as her motive for interrupting the speech.

"Both Aboussad and Agrawal lost corporate access shortly after their disruptions and mass emails were sent to thousands of Microsoft employees including executive leadership," read an emailed statement from the group.

"As of 11:30 AM PT on Saturday, April 5, over 24 hours later, they still have not heard anything from Microsoft about the status of their employment."

Just before the event on the Microsoft campus, a group of demonstrators consisting of employees and non-employees, marched, chanted and held signs.

The National has reached out to Microsoft for comment on the demonstrations that transpired, but has not yet heard back.

In February, at least five Microsoft workers were ejected from a corporate event for protesting against the company's contracts providing AI and cloud services to the Israeli military.

Mr Suleyman became Microsoft's AI chief in 2024. On his personal website, Mr Suleyman describes himself as a “serial tech entrepreneur”. He grew up in London, and his father is from Syria.

In 2004, Mr Suleyman was listed as a board member for the Muslim Youth Helpline, which sought to advise young Muslims “in the condition of emotional need, hardship and mental distress through culturally aware and faith sensitive counselling and practical assistance”, data from the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales shows.

Mr Suleyman, whose mother was a nurse for the UK's National Health Service, spoke to Wired magazine in 2016 about AI's potential impact on health care.

“We're here to make the world a better place,” he said at the time.

In 2010, long before AI was on the tip of almost every tech pundit's tongue, he founded DeepMind, a London-based AI research company which created a buzz in tech circles.

DeepMind's AI research put it ahead of the curve, making it the envy of established tech titans such as Google, which acquired the company in 2014.

Most recently, Mr Suleyman served as co-founder and chief executive of Inflection AI.

In his 2023 book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century, worked its way on to The New York Times bestseller list.

“Properly addressing this wave, containing technology and ensuring that it always serves humanity means overcoming pessimism aversion. It means facing head-on the reality of what's coming,” he wrote.