Stanford Students Walk Out on Google CEO's Commencement Speech Over Tech Contracts and AI Concerns

Are the kids all right? The answer to that question probably depends on your criteria. At the very least, I can tell you that some of them are most definitely very mad.

The anger percolating among America’s youth was on display this graduation season, as college students across the country booed and jeered several high-profile commencement speakers who dared discuss—let alone extol the benefits of—artificial intelligence. While AI use among college kids is widespread, so too is the fear and mistrust about what the technology might mean for the future. A recent Gallup poll found that Gen Z sentiment toward AI has significantly declined, with only 22 percent of respondents expressing excitement about the tech—and anxiety around AI affecting 42 percent of them.

Among the commencement speech chaos, though, one school stood out to me: Stanford University. The California-based institution, long a key hub for Silicon Valley recruiting and a pipeline into elite tech gigs, this year saw more than a hundred students walk out of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s remarks to graduates. Ironically, Pichai didn’t explicitly mention AI in his address at all. But for the organizers of the Stanford walkout, AI is only a tangential concern: More than any specific technology, their demonstration was designed to raise awareness of Google’s contracts with the US and Israeli governments, as well as ICE.

The walkout organizers may not have convinced Google to change its ways, but they did manage to create an international news event. Media outlets including CNN and the BBC ran with the story, and videos of the walkout have amassed millions of views online. I wanted to know more about how the coordinated effort came to be, what student organizers hoped to accomplish, and how it feels to be newly graduating—from a school as Silicon Valley–aligned as Stanford, no less—into a world that’s now arguably run by Big Tech.

Two of the Stanford walkout organizers, Eva Jones and Amanda Campos, traveled to New York and sat down with me in person earlier this month. Our conversation is below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Eva Jones and Amanda Campos—welcome, both of you.

AMANDA CAMPOS: Thank you so much, Katie. Thank you for having us.

I'm delighted that you're here. Thank you for making the trip. First of all, congratulations on graduating. What did you study in school? Why did you choose Stanford four years ago when you were thinking about where to go to undergrad?

Campos: I studied environmental policy at Stanford, and I am currently working in the environmental justice activism and advocacy space in California.

I quite literally came to Stanford because I knew I wanted to take action, to solve the environmental crisis. I grew up in Brazil, and since I was little it was the huge issue I saw as being able to take action towards.

But arriving at Stanford, I quickly realized [the school] just had so much fossil fuel money and bias, and I quickly became an organizer as a result. As a sophomore, when October 2023 came, I quite quickly realized how intertwined the environmental justice movement and the movement for Palestinian liberation are.

It goes back to the corporate ties Stanford has, and choosing a Google CEO is indicative of such a tie and of such a bias, really. I was a lead organizer with Stanford SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine, and as soon as we heard about Sundar Pichai being chosen as the commencement speaker, we knew we had to do something.

Eva, what about you? What did you go to Stanford to study?

EVA JONES: I am a recent graduate, having studied hydrology and water resources for my master’s degree, but I also did my bachelor’s programs there, in feminist philosophy and in freshwater engineering.

I came to Stanford five years ago now, from a rural town in Oregon, because I truly believed that a place like Stanford was looking to pool together minds and resources to tackle these existential threats to humanity, to build the kind of world that I always envisioned could be possible, one of connection, one of belonging.

I'm curious, Amanda, you talked about how you got involved with student organizing to begin with, but I'd love to hear from both of you a little bit more about that. How did you go from student to campus activist and organizer?

Jones: I came to Stanford as a student organizer. I was of the generation of students who were part of climate justice organizing, anti-gun-violence things, people who came into university ready to use their voice, thinking of that as a way to build a future.

As soon as I got to Stanford, I got involved in anti-sexual violence organizing, which quickly put me in opposition with the administration.

By 2023, when the student encampments in solidarity with Palestine began, that was something that we saw so many more students get involved in and really come together to build something more than just opposition. It was a really beautiful moment where we got to define why we came to university for ourselves, why we came seeking an education, and what we wanted to make of that.

Campos: I'll say that, differently from Eva, I definitely did not come to Stanford as a student organizer, but I very quickly became one because it was needed.

But more broadly, I did come in also a bit naive in terms of thinking about Stanford as this place where I can innovate on environmental solutions, where I can help people.

I saw the power of education, the power of a Stanford degree as a way to do that. But I think my view of power has definitely changed, especially through organizing. I viewed power as something to gain, and now I view it as something to build, as something that we all have through our voices.

Getting involved in SJP organizing, for me, has been extremely liberating. I have a lot of hope in the student movement.

Theo Baker has a new book out, I don't know if either of you have read it, called How to Rule the World. It describes Stanford as basically what you are both saying, a funnel into tech jobs and Silicon Valley, a place with a lot of clubbiness, tech elitism, VCs scouting for talent, and plenty of ethical lapses on the part of students and faculty and administration. Do you have any reactions to that book?

Jones: I have concerns about someone looking to define their career by participating in the rabid consumption of the American cultural fascination with what’s going on at elite universities. I think it really distracts from the actual issues going on, which are, in many ways, defense-propelled career pipelines at these universities and in Silicon Valley, at these companies that run deep and fuel really violent technologies and systems of control.

I would invite anybody who is interested in Theo Baker’s book to take it a step further and become a part of a movement to counter this obsession with elitism, tech optimism, and become a part of the solution of what that means, which is participating in anti-war, in anti-data-center advocacy, in the student movement that's demanding a better future for ourselves, for the laborers across the world.

This is a global movement against the extraction and disposability of our earth and our people. I would ask everyone to look beyond the fascination with the confines of what is basically a country club for 20-year-olds seeking fame to become a part of that global mission.

It sounds like you’re saying it’s one thing to write a titillating book—I have not finished the whole book, but I imagine it would fall under that category—as opposed to rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty in the actual work.

Jones: Yeah, and I will invite Theo Baker to participate in that. I think that if people want to be a part of opposing these elite circles that seem to control everything from our politics to our educations, they should get involved, they should get organized, instead of just being discursal witnesses to what's going on.

Which brings me to the walkout. This walkout was not just about AI. You actually issued a press release about the walkout, and I have to give you credit, very impressive. That press release names several issues. There are Google’s contracts with the US government, you mentioned ICE specifically, and then the technological aid provided to Israel, specifically Google's Project Nimbus. Tell us more about what you were protesting on that day and why.

Campos: As soon as we heard that Stanford chose Sundar Pichai to be our commencement speaker we knew we had to speak out. Because for years, through Tech for Liberation organizing, Palestinian liberation organizing, we knew that Google was one of the companies providing the technological backbone for what the UN commission has found to be a genocide, for the continued surveillance and apartheid that Israel imposes on the Palestinian people. And we also knew that Google provides a key technological backbone of ICE’s surveillance, targeting, and quite literally killing operations.

When it comes to AI, it is causing a lot of job losses for the working class, and recent grads have concerns about that. However, AI is not only causing job losses, it's quite literally killing people, and that is something that we knew we just had to call out. We had the opportunity, as well as the duty, to at least try to hold a CEO of a $4 trillion company accountable. Students were able to do just that, or at least a step toward it.

Jones: The walkout was much more than that. The walkout was not just a walkout, it was the walkout to the People's Commencement. The People's Commencement was a place where we, as students of conviction, with our parents, with our mentors, with our friends, got to celebrate the education that we forged at times in opposition to the university and its corporate sponsors.

Many of us, including myself and Amanda, were not excited to go celebrate an education that we fundamentally believe to be in service of the liberated world that we want to see at some corporate buyout, [an] advertisement for the likes of Google or whoever Stanford had decided that was going to be.

Right. You held a separate event that happened at the same time as his speech and the commencement.

Jones: From there, graduates and their families and friends, people that we had worked with all across the university, came together and gathered in what was a beautiful ceremony to celebrate the conviction with which we want to use our educations, and celebrate what it means to have gone up against the dominant narrative and career pipelines at a university like Stanford.

I can't imagine a better way to have celebrated my graduation.

My next question was, I was just thinking: I dropped out of a master's degree program …

Campos: Nice.

… only a few credits shy. Nothing like what you’re talking about, but my dad was so mad at me. And it made me wonder as you were talking, what did your parents think?

Jones: When I told them I was walking out, at first they were a little bit like, “Oh, my God.” They were not super happy about it, because I graduated high school in 2020. I didn’t get a high school graduation. So they were like, “What about one ceremony? Like, we wanna celebrate you. We know you’ve worked hard for this.”

My parents are very supportive of the work I do, but even them as people who, you know, they’re like, “I wanna see your speech at the protest”—they're very supportive, but they were like, “Even though you’ve worked hard, you didn’t even get a high school graduation. What do you think?”

But after attending the People's Commencement, they were really blown away. They're gonna get me emotional, but they thanked me, and they were like, “Thank you for bringing us into this community that you’ve created, and we understand why this means so much to you, because this is more meaningful than anything that could’ve been told to us in some hot stadium by some CEO or whatever. This clearly means something to you. This means something to the world.” So yeah, I’m very lucky in that way.

You sound like you have good parents.

Jones: I do. I do. I love them.

How about you, Amanda?

Campos: I have my dad and my sibling. I have been an organizer for years, so I went to my dad and I said, “Hey, I’m gonna walk out. You will love the People's Commencement, and you will hear from Mahmoud Khalil, you’ll hear from Eva Jones, you'll hear from people, organizers, who have much better messages to tell than the Google CEO.”

I think the most memorable thing to me really was I have a younger sibling in high school, and for me, through my organizing, but really through my entire life, it’s been really important to me to be a good role model, but also someone that they can look up to. So for me it was just absolutely beautiful having them there.

As I was introducing speakers and such, being able to look at them and see that there is a different world that we’re building for them, for my sibling, for all younger people, for all kids, one that we can actually have a voice in and celebrate.

Did you expect the walkout to generate as much press and get as much attention as it did? At WIRED, we were sharing videos in Slack. It was covered by the BBC, CNN. Did you see that coming? Did you plan for that?

Campos: Honestly, we were just so focused on organizing. We definitely wanted to have good media and such, but we definitely did not see the widespread media attention coming.

Did anyone in your group think about how to maximize exposure? Were you tactical?

Jones: I think that, very often, student organizers against tech and against military tech in particular are shoehorned by media outlets to be sort of reactionary and focused on their own career opportunities. So what was really important to us was to show the depth of the student movement here.

This is something that students across the globe know, and that's why students are booing AI speakers. We understand that these corporations are extracting minerals from across the world and exploiting workers, are setting up data centers in hometowns just like mine, are trying to mechanize warfare and program ethics for some sort of omniscient and objective world. We understand the connections there. We understand that this is not just our job market. We understand that this is the ethical future of humanity. This is the environmental future that we are going to inherit.

This is a movement of consciousness and solidarity that is worldwide. So in our messaging, I think it’s really important to make sure that we connect those [things] and we’re not shoehorned into some sort of narrow frame that we’re just concerned about AI taking our jobs or something.

What’s the backlash been like? I’m sure you've heard from people who were not on board with what you did or with your message.

Jones: Not students.

Campos: I would say that among students there’s definitely popular opposition against inviting the Google CEO as the commenceme