The unsigned blog post on Microsoft’s corporate website appears to be the company’s first public acknowledgement of its deep involvement in the war, which started after Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel and has led to the deaths of tens of thousands in Gaza.
It comes nearly three months after an investigation by The Associated Press revealed previously unreported details about the American tech giant’s close partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, with military use of commercial AI products skyrocketing by nearly 200 times after the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The AP reported that the Israeli military uses Azure to transcribe, translate and process intelligence gathered through mass surveillance, which can then be cross-checked with Israel’s in-house AI-enabled targeting systems and vice versa.
Yeah, I have a first edition of that book, it was actually startling reading it.
The note on the cover about “America’s most powerful corporation” is a BIT of hyperbole…
American companies were forbidden from doing business with Germany, BUT… IBM just happened to have a division in Switzerland and they had NO PROBLEM supplying the Nazis with the punch card tech they needed to catalog, track, round up, and exterminate their Jewish population.