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Resident Advisor MAY 22, 2025 - by Hattie Lindert

BRIAN ENO PENS OPEN LETTER TO MICROSOFT OVER ITS DEALINGS WITH ISRAELI MILITARY

Eno famously composed the start-up chime for the company's Windows 95 operating system - he's now pledged to donate his fee to humanitarian aid in Gaza.

Brian Eno has published an open letter to Microsoft regarding the company's ongoing dealings with the Israeli military.

In the mid-'90s, Eno composed the start-up chime for Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system. Eno estimates the short melody, which was recently added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry (NRR), has been heard by "billions of people" over the last few decades.

In the open letter, shared on May 20, Eno addressed his former employer "not as a composer...but as a citizen alarmed by the role Microsoft is playing in a very different kind of composition: one that leads to surveillance, violence and destruction in Palestine." Eno was responding to a May 15 statement from Microsoft, wherein the company confirmed it provides Israel's Ministry of Defence with a variety of technology, including access to its Azure AI software and corresponding cloud. A February investigation from the Associated Press reported that the Israeli military uses Azure to transcribe, translate and process intelligence uncovered through mass surveillance projects.

Microsoft did not directly address how the IDF uses these technologies, stating that the company "does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices." Eno's letter urged Microsoft to suspend these services regardless, writing: "If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes." He also expressed solidarity with Microsoft workers who have protested the company's practice, and pledged to donate his original fee from working on Windows 95 to "helping the victims of the attacks on Gaza."

"We now live in an age where corporations like Microsoft often command more influences than governments," Eno wrote. "I believe that with such power comes an absolute ethical responsibility."

Throughout his career, Eno has consistently vocalised his criticism of Israel, collaborating with the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement as far back as 2014. Earlier this month, Eno was one of more than two hundred artists to sign an open letter to London festival Field Day, calling on organisers to address the event's relationship to private-equity firm KKR.