At commencement ceremonies in 2026, the mere point out of artificial intelligence is enough to garner boos from the crowd.
It occurred on the College of Central Florida, the place speaker Gloria Caulfield stated the “rise of synthetic intelligence is the following industrial revolution.” It occurred at Middle Tennessee State University, the place Large Machine Information CEO Scott Borchetta claimed “AI is rewriting manufacturing as we sit right here.” And it occurred at the University of Arizona, the place former Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that AI “will contact each career, each classroom, each hospital, each laboratory, each individual, and each relationship you will have.”
One would possibly suppose the pattern continued when present Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s speech at Stanford College was met with boos and even a walkout—however regardless of Pichai helming one of many foremost corporations within the AI business, Stanford’s graduates had a wholly completely different purpose for protesting his speech.
Throughout his graduation speech on Sunday, June 14, Pichai by no means introduced up AI, as a substitute specializing in his life story, expertise as an immigrant, and profession at Google. Nonetheless, round 200 graduates booed and walked out throughout Pichai’s speech, chanting “free, free Palestine” and sporting protest indicators.
Stanford grads stroll out as Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage as graduation speaker. No point out of AI, in contrast to different uni audio system getting booed down this yr. Story for @sfgate shortly pic.twitter.com/qvS2rJ91Ip
— Matt Brown (@maattttbrown) June 14, 2026
Google’s cope with Israel
The professional-Palestine demonstration at Stanford comes amid Google’s ongoing “Mission Nimbus” cope with Israel. In 2021, Google and Amazon signed a $1.2 billion contract to offer the Israeli authorities and navy with cloud computing infrastructure and AI amongst different technological providers.
As Israel’s conflict on Gaza garnered heightened consideration in 2024, controversy round Mission Nimbus reached a fever pitch. Google staff protested the corporate’s ties to Israel by way of sit-in protests at Google workplaces in New York and California. Google called the police on those protesters, then fired more than 50 employees over the next few weeks. On the time, Google claimed that “each single a kind of whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively concerned in disruptive exercise inside our buildings.”
On the time, Pichai wrote in a blog post that Google has “a tradition of vibrant, open dialogue,” adopted by what some noticed as a imprecise warning.
“This can be a enterprise, and never a spot to behave in a means that disrupts coworkers or makes them really feel unsafe, to aim to make use of the corporate as a private platform, or to battle over disruptive points or debate politics,” he wrote. “That is too necessary a second as an organization for us to be distracted.”
Stanford’s different graduation
When graduates walked out of Stanford’s official commencement ceremony, they didn’t forgo the idea of graduation totally. As an alternative, they went to a student-hosted “Individuals’s Graduation,” the place activist Mahmoud Khalil delivered a graduation speech as a substitute. Final yr, Khalil was on the heart of the pro-Palestine protests at Columbia College, being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for more than 100 days and threatened with deportation.
“All through historical past, college students have stood on the forefront of struggles for civil rights, labor rights, peace, justice, and human dignity,” Khalil stated in his graduation speech.
Talking to CNN, a Stanford graduate defined why they selected to protest Stanford’s official graduation and attend the Individuals’s Graduation as a substitute.
“Stanford’s curiosity in making a ceremony which works to honor their company donors quite than their college students is why we’ve come right here right this moment: to have a good time ourselves and our conviction on the planet we need to create with the educations that we acquired right here right this moment,” they stated.
