Microsoft acknowledged on Thursday that it sold advanced AI and cloud computing services to the Israeli military during the war in Gaza and aided in efforts to locate and rescue Israeli hostages. But the company also said it has found no evidence to date that its Azure platform and AI technologies were used to target or harm people in Gaza.
The unsigned blog post on Microsoft’s 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 defence, with military use of commercial AI products skyrocketing by nearly 200 times after the deadly October 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.
The partnership reflects a growing drive by tech companies to sell their AI products to militaries for a wide range of uses, including in Israel, Ukraine and the US. However, human rights groups have raised concerns that AI systems, which can be flawed and prone to errors, are being used to help make decisions about who or what to target, resulting in the deaths of innocent people.
Microsoft said on Thursday that employee concerns had prompted the company to launch an internal review and hire an external firm to undertake “additional fact-finding”.
The statement also did not directly address several questions about precisely how the Israeli military is using its technologies, and the company declined Friday to comment further. Microsoft declined to answer written questions from The AP about how its AI models helped translate, sort and analyse intelligence used by the military to select targets for airstrikes.
The company’s statement said it had provided the Israeli military with software, professional services, Azure cloud storage and Azure AI services, including language translation, and had worked with the Israeli government to protect its national cyberspace against external threats.