Microsoft activists call for ban on AI in military targeting, autonomous weapons, surveillance

Authors cite Gaza AI strikes, Iran school bombing, US surveillance uses

Two Microsoft-affiliated activists published a Guardian opinion essay Sept. 25 calling for an immediate ban on the sale and use of artificial intelligence in military targeting, autonomous weapons systems, and mass surveillance, arguing that the technology’s catastrophic risks are already being realized.

Granate Kim, campaigns director at MPower Change, and Mohamed Hussein, a leader in the internal “Palestinians and Allies at Microsoft” employee group, co-authored the essay under their affiliation with “No Azure for Apartheid,” an employee-led movement pressing Microsoft to end its work with the Israeli military.

The essay appears amid a broader push for AI regulation in the US, where bipartisan congressional activity and increasingly public warnings from AI industry leaders have coincided with dismissals of AI risks from President Donald Trump, who according to Kim and Hussein has called such risks a “hoax” and described limits on the technology as a “sick conspiracy.”

On Gaza, Kim and Hussein cited reporting by Oscar-winning Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham — whose documentary film NAZA includes testimonials from the soldiers involved — to claim that the Israeli military used AI to identify people to kill, with 12,000 targets generated and bombed in the first month alone. The bombings were carried out, the authors wrote, with “little to no meaningful human oversight.”

On Iran, Kim and Hussein wrote that a US military AI-involved airstrike struck Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing 156 children, teachers and other civilians. They characterized the strike as “almost certainly the worst incident of civilian casualties in the war” and wrote that it was “most likely” the result of a “targeting mistake” that relied on faulty data.

The essay also documented domestic US applications of AI it characterized as harmful. The authors wrote that the Department of Homeland Security is using AI tools, including Microsoft’s Azure platform, to “monitor, arrest and deport immigrants at a massive scale.” They cited facial recognition technology’s documented algorithmic bias against Latino and Black Americans, and a New York Daily News report on the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, which uses Azure to connect to 18,000 security cameras. According to the authors, the surveillance system has expanded to Georgia and internationally to Brazil and Singapore.

Kim and Hussein also raised concerns about data center construction, writing that facilities powering AI are being built in rural and low-income US neighborhoods, exposing residents living under the poverty line to “significant health threats from air pollution.”

The authors framed their warnings against a recent wave of industry cautions. They noted that Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Satya Nadella, and Bill Gates have all recently called for slowing AI development. Kim and Hussein highlighted a nearly 6,000-word essay Gates published in late August warning about AI’s potential harms to humanity, noting that one of the authors has been a Microsoft employee for nearly a decade and that both have spent the past two years organizing with other Microsoft employees and activists to uncover what they described as Microsoft’s role in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

On the political response, Kim and Hussein noted that Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have jointly urged Congress to regulate AI — an alignment they wrote makes regulation “one of the very few issues to unite Americans across the political spectrum.” They cited warnings from AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who wrote on Twitter/X that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” and believe the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

The essay also documented what the authors characterized as government pushback against AI criticism. Trump has called AI risks a “hoax” and described attempts to limit the technology’s power as part of a “sick conspiracy,” according to Kim and Hussein. House Republicans, the authors said, have blamed Chinese government disinformation for public opposition to data centers. Israel’s culture minister Miki Zohar has threatened to revoke the citizenship of NAZA filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, accusing them of “treason against the state,” they wrote.

On US legislation, Kim and Hussein highlighted two recent proposals: the House’s Frontier Act, which would embed third-party evaluators within tech companies to conduct safety assessments, and the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, introduced earlier this month by Senator Sanders and Representative Greg Casar to halt development of AI technologies “that humans cannot control.”

Kim and Hussein wrote that the bills are “a good starting point” but warned they could take years to pass and do not address ongoing harms. They called on frontier AI companies and governments to act immediately to ban the selling and use of AI in military targeting, autonomous weapons systems, and mass surveillance — a position the authors wrote that employees from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind are also calling for.