Stanford Students Walked Out on Google's CEO at Graduation. Here Is What They Actually Wanted.

Key points

• More than 100 Stanford University students walked out during Google CEO Sundar Pichai's commencement address in June 2025.
• Pichai didn't mention artificial intelligence once; the walkout centred on Google's contracts with the US and Israeli governments and with ICE, the federal immigration enforcement agency.
• A Gallup poll found only 22 percent of Gen Z respondents expressed excitement about AI, while 42 percent said it makes them anxious.
• Organisers Eva Jones and Amanda Campos spoke with Wired AI about their motivations after the event drew global media coverage.

One hundred students stood up and walked away. That is the headline from Stanford's graduation ceremony this year, where Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, delivered the commencement address to the class of 2025. CNN and the BBC both covered it. Videos racked up millions of views.

Pichai never said the word "artificial intelligence" once. His speech didn't touch AI at all.

The target, according to lead organisers Eva Jones and Campos, was Google's contracts with the US government, the Israeli government, and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that handles deportations). They chose Pichai's speech as their moment because Stanford, long regarded as a direct pipeline into Silicon Valley jobs, had selected a Big Tech CEO as its headline speaker.

"I viewed power as something to gain," Campos told Wired AI. "And now I view it as something to build."

Jones framed it differently. She described "defense-propelled career pipelines" running between elite universities and major technology companies, pipelines she says fund what she called "violent technologies and systems of control."

Neither student is a tech outsider. Jones holds a master's in hydrology and water resources from Stanford, plus undergraduate degrees in feminist philosophy and freshwater engineering. Campos studied environmental policy and now works in environmental justice advocacy in California. Jones came to Stanford from a rural Oregon town believing the university would help tackle existential threats. Campos arrived hoping to innovate on environmental solutions. Both left feeling the institution was part of the problems they'd come to solve.

Their walkout sits inside a broader mood shift. The Gallup data is consistent: among Gen Z respondents, excitement about AI sits at just 22 percent while anxiety reaches 42 percent. That tracks with what played out at campuses across the country this spring, where several commencement speakers who praised AI were booed or jeered by graduating classes.

Our earlier story on young adults turning to AI for emotional intimacy found a generation navigating technology with real ambivalence: drawn to it, wary of who controls it.

What does this mean for ordinary people following the AI debate?

The Stanford walkout is a useful reminder that public anxiety about AI isn't really about chatbots or autocomplete. For many young people, it's about who controls the technology and what governments do with it. Contracts between large AI companies and military or immigration agencies are the specific flashpoint, and that debate is getting louder as those contracts grow.

If you want to form your own view, look up which AI products your government uses and who built them. The information is mostly public.