Ibtihal Abousaad is a Moroccan engineer and programmer born in 1999. She graduated from Harvard University in the United States, specializing in artificial intelligence, and worked at the global tech giant Microsoft.
On the company’s 50th anniversary, during a celebratory event, Ibtihal staged a protest, denouncing what she called Microsoft’s “collusion” with the Israeli occupation by providing its AI tools to support the Israeli military.
Early Life and Education
Ibtihal was born in 1999 in Morocco’s capital, Rabat. She completed her high school education at Moulay Youssef High School in 2017, majoring in mathematical sciences, before receiving a scholarship to study at Harvard University.
In the summer of 2016, before joining Harvard, she participated in the “TechGirls” program — a summer academic exchange funded and sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The program aims to foster talent in STEM fields among girls aged 15 to 17 and selects some of them for scholarships and further education in the U.S.
Between 2012 and 2024, more than 44,000 individuals benefited from this program, which operates across the Middle East and North Africa, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine.
Ibtihal shared her experience in a YouTube video while she was still in high school, describing it as “a life-changing experience” that allowed her to gain hands-on knowledge by visiting tech companies and engineering labs in the U.S., and meeting some of the world’s leading tech innovators.
She added that the program gave her valuable skills, which she aimed to use to transform technological literacy in her community. She also benefited from the cultural exchange with girls from other nationalities.
Following the program, she expressed her desire “to work hard to bridge the education gap in Morocco, make quality education accessible to all, and improve school curricula to equip students with broader knowledge and personal skills to become agents of change.”
Professional Experience
While still in high school, Ibtihal co-founded an online forum called “IT Weekend”, focused on teaching computer science to underprivileged elementary school girls. She also contributed to another initiative, “Technovation Challenge”, which trained girls in tech and involved them in solving local community issues through mobile apps.
She later joined a digital literacy program in Boston, teaching basic coding to elementary students. Additionally, she helped establish “Recentibus”, a non-profit digital platform aimed at storing and documenting medical records for refugees worldwide.
Working at Microsoft
After graduating from Harvard with a degree in computer science and a focus on artificial intelligence, Ibtihal joined Microsoft in 2022.
She worked in the AI division and was part of a team that developed advanced technologies and products for the company, including the cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure.
She also worked with a team tasked with building technologies for surveillance and data analysis.
Denouncing Collusion with Israel
At the event marking Microsoft’s 50th anniversary — after three and a half years at the company — Ibtihal interrupted a speech by Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s Executive Vice President of AI (a British national of Syrian descent), accusing Microsoft of enabling the Israeli occupation through AI.
“You claim to care about using AI for good,” she told Suleyman, “but Microsoft is selling AI weapons to the Israeli military. 50,000 people have died, and Microsoft is supporting this genocide in our region.”
Later, The Verge published what it described as a letter from Ibtihal, in which she wrote that she could no longer remain silent after discovering that Microsoft’s technologies were being used to support the Israeli military.
She revealed that Microsoft had signed a $133 million contract with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to store massive data through its Azure cloud services — a contribution she described as part of Israel’s surveillance system targeting Palestinians.
In the letter, Ibtihal accused Microsoft of “suppressing dissent” from employees who tried to raise concerns over the issue. She said the company “fired two employees merely for organizing a protest.”
“I was devastated by the images of innocent children covered in ash and blood, grieving parents, and the destruction of entire families and communities,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, our AI work is enabling this surveillance and killing.”
She added: “When I joined the AI team, I was excited to contribute to advancing technology for the good of humanity. I was never told that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government to spy on journalists, doctors, aid workers — and kill entire civilian families.”
The letter also disclosed that Israel’s use of Microsoft and OpenAI technologies had increased 200-fold by March 2025 compared to before the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood operation.
She emphasized that Microsoft’s AI powers “some of the Israeli military’s most sensitive and secretive projects, including the target bank and the Palestinian population registry.”
Sources: Al Jazeera + Agencies + Online Platforms
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