Another industry giant’s commencement speech has been met with disapproval from graduates. Google, once again, is the company involved with the speaker, but this time the issue is not AI, but the company’s involvement with Israel.
According to Erin Wu of The Information, a speech by Google CEO Sundar Pichai was protested in the form of a walkout, along with chants of “Free, Free, Palestine” and “Shame on you”.
More than 100 Stanford students just walked out of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s commencement speech and chanted “Free, Free Palestine.” Google has a cloud contract with the Israeli government. Lots of abuse and slogans like “Shame on you” pic.twitter.com/2dIqs1SBvi
– Erin Woo (@erinkwoo) June 14, 2026
In a video of the ceremony, Pichai continues his speech while dozens (“more than 100” by Wu’s count) graduates march to the exit. That part of the speech does not appear to touch on any sensitive or controversial material – giving the impression that it was not unintended. In fact, looking at the transcript of the speech, it appears that Pichai had just begun speaking.
Google and Amazon have a joint contract with the Israeli military and government called “Project Nimbus”. The contract is reportedly worth $1.2 billion or 4 billion shekels according to Israel and provides Israel with cloud computing, advanced AI and more. Reports about the actual details of Project Nimbus come primarily from leaks. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized the companies for their alleged lack of transparency surrounding Project Nimbus.
One of Pichai’s predecessors, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, was strongly criticized during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona’s commencement ceremony about a month ago. The uproar occurred when Schmidt touched on AI, and I wrote at the time that Schmidt failed to read the room. This appeared to be the case, but subsequent reporting made it clear that some of the commotion was probably pre-planned. Schmidt was already a controversial speaker due to his possible ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and some interruptions reportedly included graduates chanting “Epstein files! Epstein files!” Shouting was involved.
In at least one photo, Stanford graduates held painted banners. One of them refers to ICE. In February, 900 Google employees demanded transparency about Google’s relationship with the federal government, citing concerns that its technology was fueling the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The booing of commencement speakers this graduation season has attracted considerable media attention. Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield and music executive Scott Borchetta were also vilified this year, but in those cases, the crowd’s hostility was clearly a reaction to their defense of AI.
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