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.
• Sundar Pichai did not mention artificial intelligence once in his speech; the walkout centred on Google's contracts with the US and Israeli governments and with ICE, the US immigration enforcement agency.
• A recent Gallup poll found that only 22 percent of Gen Z respondents expressed excitement about AI, while 42 percent said the technology makes them anxious.
• Walkout 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 University's graduation ceremony this year, where Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, delivered the commencement address to the class of 2025.

The walkout travelled fast. CNN and the BBC both covered it. Videos racked up millions of views.

Here is the thing, though: Pichai never said the word "artificial intelligence" once. His speech did not touch AI at all.

So what were the students actually protesting? According to two lead organisers, Eva Jones and Amanda Campos, the target 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 the moment to make noise because Stanford itself, a school long regarded as a direct pipeline into Silicon Valley jobs, had chosen a Big Tech CEO as its headline speaker.

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

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

Neither student is a tech outsider. Jones holds a master's degree in hydrology and water resources from Stanford, plus an undergraduate degree in feminist philosophy and freshwater engineering. Campos studied environmental policy and now works in environmental justice advocacy in California. Both came to Stanford believing the university would help them solve large problems. Both left feeling the institution was part of those problems.

Their walkout sits inside a broader mood shift. The Gallup polling data tells a consistent story: among adults aged 18 to 26, excitement about AI dropped sharply in recent years, landing at just 22 percent in the most recent survey, while anxiety about AI reached 42 percent. That tracks with what played out at campuses across the country this spring, where several high-profile commencement speakers who praised AI were booed or jeered by graduating classes.

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

The Stanford walkout is a useful reminder that public anxiety about AI is not really about chatbots or autocomplete. For many young people, it is 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 only getting louder as those contracts grow larger.

If you are watching this story unfold and want to form your own view, the most useful thing you can do is look up which AI products your government uses and who built them. The information is mostly public.