Technology

Art rock legend Brian Eno has called on Microsoft to sever its ties with the government of Israel, saying the company's provision of cloud and AI services to Israel's Ministry of Defense "support a regime that is engaged in actions described by leading legal scholars and human rights organizations, the United Nations experts, and increasing numbers of governments from around the world, as genocidal."

Eno's connection with Microsoft goes back 30 years—he composed the famous boot-up jingle for Windows 95 that was recently inducted into the National Recording Registry at the US Library of Congress.

"I gladly took on the project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company," Eno wrote in an open letter posted to Instagram (via Stereogum). "I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war."

Regardless, Eno clearly isn't interested in Microsoft's protestations of innocence: "Selling and facilitating advanced AI and cloud services to a government engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing is not 'business as usual'. It is complicity. If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes."