This year the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Engineering Open House 2025 was expecting 40,000 visitors April 4 and 5. Designed to showcase the talents and research of students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields, the theme this year was “The Age of Innovation.” In this era of increased government surveillance and record-breaking military budgets, we should be asking ourselves “just what kind of innovation do you mean?”
The links between the university system and the military-industrial complex are well understood. In fact, the list of corporate partners available on the Grainger College of Engineering website includes military aerospace giants like Raytheon and Boeing. No surprise then that the college’s Aerospace Engineering page lists Northrop Grumman as one of the top employers of UIUC graduates. The weekend’s 2025 “Age of Innovation” first-place award went to a project called “Pilot your Drone: Air Traffic Adventureland.” UIUC’s aerospace engineering program ranks number six in the country. Thus it is small wonder that student-led groups like Illini Unmanned Aerial Vehicles bring together students from different fields such as computer, mechanical, and electronics engineering, as well as computer science and finance. It is this link specifically—the one between engineering and computer science as it relates to the military-industrial complex—that has not been as well investigated on campus.
One such factor developing currently is the trend toward so-called “AI tools.” “AI” has come to stand for computer applications that generate “human-like” responses, or are designed to think or act like a human. These tools have moved toward increased commercialization with chip manufacturers like Nvidia leading the industry. The velocity of capital has become so overwhelming that universities are following suit: for example, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications here at UIUC advertises on its website that it’s “all-in” on AI. The increased demand for AI in related training fields and education is directly related to the superprofits shared with members of the imperial core in the form of wages and benefits.
So what are these AIs used for? One of the most horrific examples has been to produce databases called “kill lists” for Israeli occupation bombing campaigns. One is called “Where’s Daddy?,” which +972 magazine reported on last year. This AI is actually a tool that the Israeli military uses to send officers alerts about when targets enter buildings so that they can be bombed. Another AI weapon in their arsenal is called “Lavender,” which is a system linked to a database that assigns scores to people—rating their supposed relation to Hamas and other militant groups, and thus their eligibility for being assassinated—based on information culled from their digital footprints. If they are anything like ChatGPT, which hallucinates real-sounding sources, the real world use-cases of AIs are truly terrifying.
The same weekend the Engineering Open House was taking place, Ibithal Aboussad, a Moroccan AI Engineer for Microsoft’s AI Platform, interrupted a keynote speech by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiyman during the company’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration. Video of the protest, shared online, shows Aboussad denouncing the speech, saying “Shame on you. You are a war profiteer,” before concluding “You have blood on your hands. All of Microsoft has blood on its hands.” In a statement Aboussad released directly after the event, she explains that she had no other options: “Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil.”
Her statement is incredibly useful in understanding the links between computer engineering and the military-industrial complex. Aboussad states that according to an AP News report there is a $133 million contract between Microsoft and the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Aboussad continues, “The Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft and OpenAI artificial intelligence spiked last March to nearly 200 times higher than before the week leading up to the October 7 attack. The amount of data it stored on Microsoft servers doubled between that time and July, 2024 to more than 13.6 petabytes.”
These connections are especially important to understand because computer engineers make up a link in the chain of the military-industrial complex, with direct ties right here in our own backyard. Microsoft continues to be a major corporate partner for the U of I, being listed among the industry partners on Grainger’s College of Engineering website. Aboussad’s statement, as well as her public denouncement, helps shed light on the links here in our community as well.
Caterpillar, whose former headquarters was in Peoria, is a major corporate partner for the Engineering Open House. Their practice of supplying bulldozers to the Israeli occupation to destroy infrastructure and brutally murder civilians is well documented. In 2004, the parents of one American victim of the Israeli occupation, Rachel Corrie, called for an international day of action against the company, and gathered at a rally at their headquarters (their daughter was intentionally crushed to death under a Caterpillar bulldozer).
The point is that real computer engineers and software developers build and maintain these databases, write the code, and market the software, and they are trained in this work here at the U of I. Palantir has been in the news lately because its current CEO David Karp signed a liberal Zionist letter to “return the hostages.” (Which is really amazing, given the understanding that technologies like the ones Palantir sells are designed to bomb Gazan targets without regard to who else is in the room—including hostages.) The cofounder of this multibillion-dollar defense contractor is none other than Peter Thiel, who, according to Bloomberg, secured a “strategic partnership” with Israel after a trip to Tel Aviv last year. All the more stunning then that the U of I’s Entrepreneurship portal lists Palantir among their startups, because Thiel was part of the original team that created the company.
These links are historic and very material, and yet they aren’t talked about in the same breath as Caterpillar because their database tools are so widely misunderstood. Aboussad understood that the translation work she does for Microsoft results in their increased ability to market their products to the highest bidders. In addition to companies like Northrup Grumman, Elbit Systems, and Raytheon that design and build the weapons themselves, there is another side of the military operation that is software-based and whose links are no less material. It is up to us to identify those links and struggle against them here at home.
Alen Romero is a local Marxist revolutionary writer, thinker, and organizer. He has worked in education for the past seven years.
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