Roughly 200 students protested Google's military and ICE contracts, including the $1.2B Project Nimbus cloud contract between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government, and built a counter ceremony headlined by Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and former Columbia…
While roughly 200 Stanford graduates turned their backs on Google CEO Sundar Pichai's commencement address, a larger crowd filled an auditorium across the street for the People's Commencement, an alternative ceremony headlined by Mahmoud Khalil, an Algerian-Palestinian activist and former Columbia organizer who was detained by plainclothes ICE agents for 104 days in 2025 without charges. The dual ceremonies, held over the weekend of June 13 and 14, were not a spontaneous outburst. Students had spent the previous 24 hours mapping Google's military and surveillance contracts — including the Project Nimbus cloud deal with the Israeli government and Google Cloud contracts supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and then building a working alternative ceremony to register their refusal.
The walkout came as Pichai, a Stanford alumnus (MS '93, MBA '02), took the podium. Protesters jeered, blew whistles, and unfurled banners; smaller groups in the audience waved Palestinian flags before also leaving mid-speech. The dissent was visible against a graduating undergraduate class of roughly 2,000, putting turnout near 10 percent of the cohort. But the size of the jeering crowd was not the story's spine. The spine was across the street, where the People's Commencement had been organized in under 24 hours, complete with a speaker lineup, a physical venue, and a press operation that put Khalil, a figure who has become a national symbol of ICE enforcement overreach, in front of graduating students who did not want to share a stage with Google's leadership.
Pichai's prepared remarks leaned heavily on defending AI as a force for broad economic benefit, a defense that the protesters had effectively pre-empted by naming the specific contracts they opposed. The Google DeepMind Pentagon AI contract, signed in 2025, allows the Defense Department to use DeepMind models without a refusal clause — a departure from the guardrails most frontier AI labs maintain, according to the organizers' walkout pledge. Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract between Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government signed in 2021, has become a focal point of organized employee dissent inside Google for years. The ICE contracts are less visible inside the company but support the agency's growing reliance on cloud-based surveillance tooling.
The choice of Khalil as the headliner was a deliberate signal. Khalil, a lawful US resident with no criminal history, was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents in March 2025 at his apartment near the Columbia campus. Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked his visa, citing his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. Khalil spent 104 days in detention without ever being convicted or charged with a crime. In the past twelve months, he has emerged as a recurring figure at high-profile campus actions — this was the second consecutive year Stanford organizers held a People's Commencement. The Stanford organizers framed the counter-ceremony as a refusal to let commencement serve as a branding opportunity for companies whose contracts they had spent the previous year documenting.
Pichai, for his part, seemed prepared for a different protest. Learning from the dozens of commencement speakers who had been jeered for mentioning AI, he chose not to broach the topic, instead speaking about his own life story. Still, the soft-spoken CEO didn't completely escape backlash.
The Stanford action, by substituting a working parallel institution for a tantrum, sets a higher bar for the next campus that wants to register the same critique. The People's Commencement worked because organizers had spent the previous day mapping the specific contracts, recruiting a headliner with national reach, and producing a venue that could absorb the students who chose not to stay in the official ceremony. That is the template that travels.