On the left, Microsoft President Brad Smith, representative of North Rhine Westphalia in Berlin on June 4, 2025, will speak at a press conference on the future vision for the development and application of artificial intelligence in education in North Rhine Westphalia.
Soeren Stache | Photo Alliance | Getty Images
Microsoft On Thursday, he said it had stopped splitting the provision of certain services into the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The company did not say which particular services provided.
The decision said that after the software company investigated an August report from the Guardian, Israeli Defence Force unit 8200 has built a system to track Palestinian phones.
“Our review is ongoing, but we found evidence to support elements of the Guardian reporting,” Microsoft President and Vice-Chair Brad Smith wrote in an email to employees. “This evidence includes information on IMOD consumption of Azure storage capacity in the Netherlands and the use of AI services.”
Microsoft’s decision to stop providing these services follows pressure from employees who protested Israel’s use of the company’s software as part of a Gaza invasion. Over the past few weeks, Microsoft has fired five employees who participated in the protest at its company headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
The move comes a week after a UN committee said Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in the invasion of Gaza.
Microsoft told Israeli defense officials it had decided to disable cloud-based storage and artificial intelligence subscriptions used by agents, Smith wrote. He said he had not considered customer data on the types of reviews Microsoft had conducted and thanked the UK newspaper for reports on the development.
“As employees, we all share our interest in protecting privacy, taking into account the business value we create by allowing our customers to rely on our services on Roce Solid Trust,” writes Smith.
On Thursday, the Guardian reported that an unknown intelligence source said the unit 8200 was planning to move phone supplies. Amazon Web services, market-leading public cloud. AWS did not immediately comment.
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