A large group of graduates walked out of Stanford University’s commencement ceremony Sunday moments after Google CEO Sundar Pichai began delivering his keynote address.
Videos circulating on social media showed more than 100 students leaving their seats at Stanford Stadium while chanting, “Free, free Palestine.”
Others could be heard booing and shouting “shame on you” as the tech titan spoke.
The protest was organized by far left radical groups including Students for Justice in Palestine and No Tech for Apartheid. Students for Justice in Palestine calls for ”death to all collaborates”, which grotesquely mimics Hamas’ justification for executing Palestinian collaborators.
They have previously posted images mourning the death of influencers in Gaza who have openly celebrated the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Pichai, a Stanford alumnus who earned a master’s degree in materials science and engineering from the university in 1995, had been selected earlier this year as the keynote speaker for Stanford’s 135th commencement ceremony held on June 14.
The protest is the latest chapter in a yearslong controversy surrounding Google’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract jointly held with Amazon to provide cloud and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government.
Critics, including some employees and pro-Palestinian activists, argue the technology could be used by Israel’s military and security agencies in ways that harm Palestinians.
Google has maintained that the contract is for government cloud services and has repeatedly defended its work.
The dispute has already roiled the company internally.
In 2024, Google fired dozens of employees after sit-ins and demonstrations at offices in California and New York protesting Project Nimbus and the company’s ties to Israel.
Sunday’s walkout also comes amid a broader wave of campus unrest and skepticism toward Big Tech at graduation ceremonies this year.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed during a commencement address at the University of Arizona earlier this year as students voiced concerns about artificial intelligence and its effect on jobs.
Similar scenes have played out at universities across the country, with graduates increasingly using commencement ceremonies to protest speakers’ corporate ties, AI advocacy and political positions.
Despite the interruptions, Pichai continued his speech, which focused largely on optimism and adapting to change rather than artificial intelligence or geopolitics.
The Google chief acknowledged the uncertainty facing graduates but urged them to choose optimism as they enter a rapidly changing world.

The Trump administration’s decision to impose sweeping export controls on Anthropic followed a frantic 24-hour effort by senior officials to convince the company to voluntarily pull a newly released artificial intelligence model that officials believed posed security risks, according to two administration officials and a senior White House official, who, like others in this story, were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode.
The move, which followed multiple tense calls between Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, underscores how the White House is wrestling in real time with regulating fast-moving, potentially dangerous AI models.
The details of the calls have not been previously reported.
The administration’s imposition of export controls forced Anthropic to pull its new AI model, Fable, just days after it was released to the public. Anthropic had given assurances that it was safe, but soon after its release, top administration officials developed fresh doubts that the AI’s guardrails were as secure as the company had suggested.
On Thursday, two days after the model’s public release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy raised concerns to the White House about the ability to bypass the model’s guardrails, according to the two administration officials and the senior White House official.
(Amazon, which is an investor in Anthropic, was responding to an administration request for feedback, said a person familiar with Amazon’s discussions.)
By Friday morning, the issue had reached the highest levels of the White House.
Bessent, Cairncross, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and other senior officials met to discuss the model and the administration’s response, according to the administration official and the senior White House official. Bessent joined remotely while traveling to Houston for a previously scheduled public event, one of them said.
Following the meeting, the administration attempted to reach Amodei but was told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat, one of the administration officials and the senior White House official said.
A spokesperson for Anthropic rejected the claim that he was at a wellness retreat, saying, “This is absolutely false.”
A person close to Anthropic said Amodei was first requested around noon and was on the phone with senior officials within an hour and 15 minutes. While he was out of pocket, Anthropic offered other senior leaders in his place, the person said.
When the administration finally reached Amodei, he participated in three calls with a combination of roughly half a dozen senior administration officials, including Cairncross, Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to the senior White House official and one of the administration officials.
Other senior White House staff and administration officials, including Undersecretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Jeffrey Kessler, White House staff secretary Will Scharf, White House deputy chief of staff Richard Walters, and assistant to the president for policy Walker Barrett, also participated in some of the calls, according to the senior White House official.
During the calls, Amodei tried to clear up what he assumed was a misunderstanding. He pushed back on the administration’s concerns, defended the guardrails, and argued that the type of bypass that occurred, which he believed to be specific, did not pose the same risk as a broader “jailbreak” that would allow it to be used without any of the guardrails put in place by Anthropic.
In a blog post after the export controls were put in place, Anthropic said that “no testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak — a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model’s safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities,” and that total avoidance of any jailbreaks isn’t now possible for them or any other companies. They defended their systems, which they said “are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad.”
Cairncross and Bessent were unmoved by Amodei’s arguments. A White House official said Amazon’s findings were run past the National Security Agency, and they felt they had “proof.”
They urged Anthropic to voluntarily remove the model and coordinate with the government to address the vulnerabilities, according to the senior White House official and the two administration officials. Amodei asked for more time and information, but he made no commitments to pull the model, and at one point, Bessent told Amodei directly that he was making a “bad decision,” according to the senior White House official.
Shortly after the call, the Trump administration imposed its export control on the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, citing national security authority and banning their use by foreign nationals, according to Anthropic. The company said the “net effect” of the order was to “abruptly disable” the models for all customers “to ensure compliance.”
“Export controls were a last resort after begging them for hours to work with us,” the senior White House official said. “This was not something we wanted to do, but our hands were tied.”
After publication, one of the people close to Anthropic disputed that the company was given a choice to voluntarily work with the administration.
“The White House gave 90 minutes to take the models down, with no details on the actual threat,” the person said. “There was never any begging — or asking — for them to work with us, just a declared 90 minute deadline.”
White House officials — who had heard Amodei liken the dangers of Anthropic’s technology to a nuclear bomb — were baffled when the CEO said he was unwilling to take the system down to address a known security vulnerability, the senior White House official said. Anthropic has defined itself among the industry as a vocal advocate for AI regulation to counter massive global security risks and job disruption as AI quickly advances.
Three people familiar with the government’s thinking said Amazon wasn’t the only company to raise concerns.
“The crux of the issue was the lack of seriousness that Anthropic was applying to it,” said one of the three people. “Had Anthropic taken it seriously and, rather than dismissing it as isolated, moved to fix or pause access, this would have never happened.”
A second person close to Anthropic refuted the idea that the “jailbreak” was a breakdown of Fable 5’s safety systems and pointed to the company’s collaboration with the administration before it released Fable. The government didn’t object to Fable’s release in multiple conversations, the person said.
In its blog post after the administration enacted the export controls, Anthropic said it was complying with the government’s directive, but called it disproportionate.
“As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles,” Anthropic said.
A White House official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said innovation remains the White House’s “number one goal, but we also have to prioritize security as well.”
Amazon, in a statement, declined to share the details of its discussions with the administration. “It’s not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “When they occur, we don’t share the details of these discussions.”
Anthropic announced in early April that its latest powerful model, Mythos, would only be available to a limited set of tech and cyber firms, which could use it to test for vulnerabilities in their software. The company needed to limit the release because the model was so powerful, it said at the time, that it could wreak havoc in the wrong hands.
The model’s debut kicked off a series of meetings between Amodei and senior White House officials. Both sides described those meetings as productive. They led to a series of conversations about regulating advanced models that culminated in a recent executive order, which requested companies voluntarily submit their advanced models to the government before deploying them widely.
Fable 5, which launched publicly this week, was described by Anthropic as a “Mythos-class model” with safeguards to make it safe for general use. The model underwent reviews by the administration and the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute.
But once the alleged security flaws were disclosed, multiple administration officials felt the model needed to be pulled.
In a post on X on Saturday morning, David Sacks, the former White House AI czar and a staunch opponent of regulation, agreed with the administration’s decision to pursue export controls for Anthropic.
Sacks said he did not believe the “jailbreak” was simple or not serious, nor did he believe the export controls were an attempt to exert control over the industry more broadly.
“The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release,” Sacks wrote. “The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.”
Sacks and other officials in the administration have been critical of Anthropic, accusing it of leftist political bias and fearmongering because of its advocacy for stronger regulation of the industry and warnings about mass job disruption.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon elevated the administration’s disagreements with Anthropic to an unprecedented level earlier this year, designating the company a supply chain risk on March 3 over its refusal to allow its AI tools to be used for mass domestic surveillance and in autonomous weapons.
On Saturday, Sacks said the past feuds between the administration and Anthropic were separate from the export control decision.
“The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court,” Sacks wrote.
This story originally appeared on POLITICO and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.
Brendan Bordelon contributed to this report.

Are we at a big inflection point for Xbox or is Microsoft just going to double down on what it’s been doing until things magically turn around, or it decides to spin off the gaming business altogether? That’s one of the questions that has arisen out of the recent whiplash between a great Xbox showcase last weekend and a harsh memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma promising a “reset” later that same week. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was asked what the model will be for its gaming business moving forward during a recent live event and while he didn’t offer many fresh clues, he certainly sounded disappointed that Xbox is so bad at making money.
“The challenge now for us is to think about how do you innovate both in hardware as well as in the games going forward in a world in an economically viable way,” he said on stage at The New York Times Hard Fork event on June 10. “I think one of the things that Asha, who has just taken over Xbox, put out is that we’ve invested a lot. No one can accuse Microsoft of not having invested for the last 25 years. And now we have to turn this into a sustainable business that delivers what is fundamentally one of the best sources of entertainment.”
He continued:
Still the challenge we have is we’ve not been monetizing that entertainment. In fact, if anything, we’ve been subsidizing that entertainment. In fact, there’s more monetization of Xbox games happening on YouTube than at Microsoft. And so that doesn’t mean we go do things that are unnatural. We want us to do what is really our job, which is to build great games, build great hardware, but we’ve got to do it in an economically sustainable way. So, I think Asha is really, 100 days in, and she put out a post saying in the next 100 days, she’s going to take a fresh look and make sure we deliver on what our fans expect of us both on the hardware side or on the publishing side.
The context around the discussion was Sharma’s unprecedentedly frank announcement last week that Xbox’s current accountability margins are only 3 percent, meaning that all of the money currently being spent on the business would actually be more profitable sitting in an index fund somewhere. That and the fact that the AI race, which the bulk of Microsoft’s business is invested in right now, is fueling historic spikes in prices for the components used to make gaming hardware. How do you launch a new console generation–Project Helix–into that environment and expect to succeed?
Nadella didn’t share a magic solution. “I think we have to find ways to deliver the games in which it is economically relevant for the customer and for us, so today there’s an issue, in fact, unfortunately, because of what’s happening with the cloud and AI, the prices have gone up, right?” he said. “It’s happening with PCs, it’s happening with phones, Xbox is impacted as well, so the scarcity of the semiconductor supply and memory in particular are having a massive impact on consumer electronics all up. That’s a temporal thing that I think we’ll get through, it is not going to be permanent, but there is a permanent thing which is what’s the Xbox model going forward and that’s where, if you think about it like PCs and consoles, both have their place obviously mobile has people playing elsewhere and so we have to now bring it all together while staying true to what we’ve always done.”
There are a couple of different ways to interpret all of this. The first is that this is just some media-trained gobbly gook you say on stage to make clear you understand the challenges facing Xbox without actually revealing any secret insights or master plan. The second is that Microsoft doesn’t know the answers to this yet and isn’t prepared to start signaling big strategy shifts until it has completed the latest round of mass layoffs and cuts across its sprawling gaming business.
Here are two other reads. Nadella is getting impatient that Xbox has been given over $80 billion in capital to acquire studios and publishers over the last decade and is still in third-place with terrible profit margins. Valve collects commissions by selling other people’s games on Steam. YouTube has a massive ad business built around creators making content around games, many of which were shipped by Microsoft (RIP Mixer). And here the company is on the cusp of the next console generation with a moat of its own: a lasting, structural advantage to help it make lots of money over the next five years.

“I’ll wait until Prime Day,” you say as your ever-growing wishlist gets even longer. Well, consider this your cue to rev up that virtual cart. Amazon has announced that Prime Day is returning earlier than usual — from June 23-26, to be precise. That’s almost a whole Prime Week of savings to look forward to! And, true to form, Amazon is making the run-up to the event as enticing as possible by rolling out a plethora of palate-pleasing early deals.
We are already digging into the discounts to find you the very best deals. We shop for a living, and we know what counts as an impressive sale and what’s simply an amuse-bouche. Luckily for all of us, many useful summer essentials have already been added to the markdown menu. We spotted up to 55% off everything from the Hanes shorts our readers go crazy for — just $13! — to a crowd-pleaser Stanley tumbler at its lowest price in 30 days. Hungry for more? Let’s dig in.
Amazon Prime Day 2026 FAQs:
What deals do you typically see on Prime Day?
You’ll find major markdowns across categories of all types during Prime Day, but certain discounts truly shine. Amazon-branded products (from Fire TVs to Kindles and more) are often at their lowest prices of the year. We commonly see vacuums and countertop kitchen appliances on mega sale, sometimes up to 50-60% off.
While grills and pool accessories will likely get their prices slashed after summer, patio furniture sets and lawn supplies are usually down to impressive lows for Prime Day. The same goes for warm-weather wardrobe and skin care essentials, like sundresses and sunscreen.
What’s better, Prime Day deals or Black Friday deals?
Asking shopping editors to choose between Prime Day and Black Friday deals is like asking a chef to choose between salt and butter. Both savings events offer stellar prices on the most sought-after items. But since they land at different times of the year, there’s some variation in the offerings.
While Prime Day is a fabulous time to score Amazon-branded items and home essentials for less, Black Friday often sees steep sales on beauty, clothing, large appliances and laptops. Of course, discounts change from year to year, so if you have something specific on your wishlist, be sure to keep an eye out no matter which sale is taking place. Surprises happen!
Does Prime Day include discounts on subscriptions?
While Prime Day memberships themselves aren’t discounted during Prime Day, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial any time of year. (After that trial month, you’ll be charged $14.99 per month, and you can cancel at any time.) If you are between 18 and 24 years old, you may qualify for a free 6-month trial.
While the best Prime Day deals are often reserved for Prime members, you don’t necessarily need a Prime account to access deals that are open to everyone. That said, you’ll save more with one, in addition to receiving perks like free shipping.
How can I track Prime Day deals?
If you’d rather not have to refresh Amazon’s deals page during Prime Day, we’ve got you. Our shopping experts will be working around the clock — literally — to dig up and curate the best Prime Day deals, sparing you from the dud discounts.
On that note, let’s get the price-slash party going early, shall we? We’re already seeing bargains popping up, so beat the rush and add these deal-hunter-approved markdowns to your cart now.
Best early Amazon Prime Day deals: Top picks
Best Amazon deals: Rare deals
Best Amazon deals: Style
Best Amazon deals: Home
Best Amazon deals: Vacuums
Best Amazon deals: Beauty
Best Amazon deals: Kitchen
Best Amazon deals: Tech
If you have Amazon Prime, you’ll get free shipping, of course. Not yet a member? No problem. You can sign up for your free 30-day trial here. (And by the way, those without Prime still get free shipping on orders of $35 or more.)
The reviews quoted above reflect the most recent versions at the time of publication.

A post shared on r/mildlyinfuriating has drawn attention online after it highlighted the story of an Indiana man who thought he had won $100,000 on a lottery scratch-off ticket, only to be told he could not collect his winnings due to a reported lottery glitch.
According to reports, Mike Fields believed he had defied the odds after scratching off a Space Invaders Cash Invasion ticket and discovering what appeared to be a $100,000 prize. However, when he took the ticket to a lottery office to claim the money, he was informed that a lottery glitch had prevented the prize from being processed.
The Hoosier Lottery Says a Technical Issue Affected the Scratch-Off Game
Fields is one of several people reportedly affected by the issue. He told Fox 59 News that he purchased the $5 Space Invaders scratch-off ticket, which revealed symbols indicating a $100,000 prize. He said he decided to play the game because he was a fan of the original Space Invaders arcade game.
Fields said he was surrounded by loved ones when he realized his ticket was a winner, and they said he began making strange noises.
After realizing he had a “golden ticket,” so to speak, Fields said he went straight to the Hoosier Lottery office at 1302 N. Meridian Street in downtown Indianapolis. But after presenting the ticket, he said employees told him the prize could not be processed immediately.
He said employees also informed him that they didn’t have any answers for him at the time, nor did they have answers for the other people who had brought in “winning” tickets. According to Fields, he was not the only person seeking to claim a prize. He was told, however, that he would be informed by mail within 30 days of whatever decision the lottery office made. If he didn’t receive an update, he was also given a number to call.
The Hoosier Lottery later said in a statement to Fox 59 that, “This morning, we became aware of a technical issue with our recently launched $5 Space Invaders Cash Scratch-off. We have halted the sale of the ticket to ensure the game experience upholds the integrity we strive to provide our players….”
Fields’s story later made its way to Reddit, where users weighed in on the situation. One user, like many others, wrote, “What exactly the glitch was, sarcastically asking, “A winning ticket????”
Another commenter wrote, “That seems illegal unless they gave out a crazy amount of 100,000 dollar prizes.”
A third Reddit user said, “I am not a lawyer, this isn’t legal advice. When you buy a lottery ticket both parties have entered a contract. Reach out to a lawyer, don’t discard the evidence.”
The Daily Dot was unable to independently verify the circumstances surrounding the alleged lottery glitch. The story gained attention after being shared on Reddit’s r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit.