Google Israel’s managing director Barak Regev ended his remarks early at an Israeli tech conference in New York yesterday after two engineers interrupted him to protest Israel’s war in Gaza and the controversial Project Nimbus.
Regev, who’s been Google's managing director in Israel since 2017, according to his LinkedIn page, was giving a talk on the state of the AI industry. Israel has been accused of using AI to select military targets in Gaza.
Before the software engineer was dragged out of the room by security, he referenced Google’s Project Nimbus contract, which he said, “puts Palestinian communities in danger".
Google signed a $1.2 billion contract called Project Nimbus with Israel in 2021 to provide the country’s military and government with cloud services, leading a group of anonymous employees from Google and Amazon, who were also involved in providing the services, to sign a letter published in the Guardian denouncing the move.
