Technology leaders who have taken the podium as graduation speakers as of late may have figured out AI evangelizing isn’t polling well with young professionals, and tweaked their messaging accordingly. But it turns out, AI isn’t the only point of tension between high-powered speakers and graduates this commencement season.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is the latest tech executive to get the cold shoulder from graduates this year. Members of Stanford’s 2026 graduating class walked out of their ceremony on Sunday as Pichai, who holds a master’s degree from the university, took the stage.
The walk-outs were organized by the Stanford chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a nationwide network of student-led activist groups advocating for Palestine’s liberation. In a statement published on Instagram, the chapter accused Google of allegedly collaborating with the Israeli government and companies like Palantir, the AI and analytics firm that has inked contracts supporting the Israeli military and the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement plan.
Activists have long criticized Google for Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract Israel signed with Google and Amazon in 2021, which grants the Israeli military access to sophisticated cloud computing and AI software. Google’s leadership has even been the target of protests from the company’s own employees, as multiple pro-Palestinian groups have organized in recent years.
When asked for comment, a Google spokesperson referred to Pichai’s comments during his speech. Stanford University did not immediately reply to Fortune’s request for comment.
The activist group’s statement said hundreds of students had been involved in the protest, and SFGate reported Sunday around 200 graduates had walked out.
“Today, Sundar Pichai was met with the sight of hundreds of students who showed they could not be allured anymore with the talk of a dollar or rapidly expanding AI,” the group wrote in its statement.
The AI backlash goes to college
Commencement speakers across the country have been met with widespread jeers over the past month, mostly in skeptical response to statements about a pending workplace evolution related to AI.
When real estate executive Gloria Caulfield referred to AI as the “next Industrial Revolution” during a University of Central Florida commencement speech last month, the audience replied with loud boos. A few days later at the University of Arizona podium, Eric Schmidt—one of Pichai’s predecessors as Google CEO—had to pause a prepared statement on the inevitability of AI in young people’s lives to make space for the audience’s hisses.
Pichai was prepared in his speech for that line of attack, entirely avoiding any direct mention of AI.
“I know today is about giving you all advice. But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say,” he said.
Without mentioning the technology by name, Pichai said AI was “truly immaterial” to his speech, in which he pushed graduates to maintain optimism, find exciting pursuits, and to not take life too seriously.
While AI didn’t directly disrupt Pichai’s speech, the technology does feature heavily in the subject of the Stanford students’ protests. AI services and software figure prominently in Project Nimbus, which critics say includes AI-powered data harvesting used for facial recognition and object tracking. Sunday’s demonstration was the third time activist groups have organized walk-outs during commencements—following similar-sized acts in 2024 and 2025—each arranged to show support for Palestine and oppose U.S. ties to Israel.
While Pichai may have shied away from commenting directly on AI’s promises and perils, away from the podium, the Google chief has been explicit about what young graduates could expect in the new technological age. When asked on the New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast last month about how he would navigate boos during his Stanford commencement speech, Pichai said he would entrust younger generations to handle the technological shift, while acknowledging graduates’ anxieties.
“Anytime we have driven technology progress I think it helps drive progress in the world, and in some ways these graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact of that technology,” he said. “I think we have to be very mindful of that.”
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