内容摘要：Dead fish float in the Tulipas stream that turned blue after an environmental accident in which a truck spilled chemical dye into the water in Jundiai, Brazil, Friday, May 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

Dead fish float in the Tulipas stream that turned blue after an environmental accident in which a truck spilled chemical dye into the water in Jundiai, Brazil, Friday, May 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

The partnership reflects a growing drive by tech companies to sell their artificial intelligence products to militaries for a wide range of uses, including in Israel, Ukraine and the United States. However, human rights groups have raised concerns that AI systems, which can be flawed and prone to errors, are being used to help make decisions about who or what to target, resulting in the deaths of innocent people.Microsoft said Thursday that employee concerns and media reports had prompted the company to launch an internal review and hire an external firm to undertake “additional fact-finding.” The statement did not identify the outside firm or provide a copy of its report.

The statement also did not directly address several questions about precisely how the Israeli military is using its technologies, and the company declined Friday to comment further. Microsoft declined to answer written questions from The AP about how its AI models helped translate, sort and analyze intelligence used by the military to select targets for airstrikes.The company’s statement said it had provided the Israeli military with software, professional services, Azure cloud storage and Azure AI services, including language translation, and had worked with the Israeli government to protect its national cyberspace against external threats. Microsoft said it had also provided “special access to our technologies beyond the terms of our commercial agreements” and “limited emergency support” to Israel as part of the effort to help rescue the more than 250 hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7.“We provided this help with significant oversight and on a limited basis, including approval of some requests and denial of others,” Microsoft said. “We believe the company followed its principles on a considered and careful basis, to help save the lives of hostages while also honoring the privacy and other rights of civilians in Gaza.”

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The company did not answer whether it or the outside firm it hired communicated or consulted with the Israeli military as part of its internal probe. It also did not respond to requests for additional details about the special assistance it provided to the Israeli military to recover hostages or the specific steps to safeguard the rights and privacy of Palestinians.

In its statement, the company also conceded that it “does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices.” The company added that it could not know how its products might be used through other commercial cloud providers.“This is a huge political and diplomatic win for Ukraine,” Mylovanov wrote on Facebook. “The deal looks fair.”

Mylovanov said the deal does not restrict Kyiv to selling only to American buyers. Instead, he said, the deal recognizes contributions from both sides: Ukraine’s in the form of revenues from new projects, and the U.S. potentially through military assistance.Kyiv residents voiced mixed reactions to the newly signed U.S.-Ukraine economic agreement, with many saying they had not yet had time to fully understand the deal’s implications.

Among those who spoke to The Associated Press about the deal was Diana Abramova, who attended a rally in Independence Square demanding information on missing Ukrainian soldiers. Her father, Valentyn Stroyvans, went missing in combat last year.“Any news is hard to take — whether it’s about negotiations or anything else,” Abramova said. “But I still believe and hope that any action will bring us closer to one thing: Ukraine’s victory. Only victory.”