On the morning of January 24 in downtown Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed protester Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at a local Veterans Affairs hospital. Just two miles away, on January 7, another ICE agent had shot and killed Nicole Renee Good, a mother. The deaths mark the first times during Donald Trump’s second term that ICE agents have shot and killed publicly verified U.S. citizens in anger.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have not said anything about the matter so far. X CEO Elon Musk previously tweeted that Renee Good “almost killed“ICE agent Jonathan Ross before Ross shot and killed her on January 7.
On the same day as Pretti’s fatal shooting on Saturday, January 24, Apple CEO Tim Cook attended a VIP screening of the new (Amazon-funded) Melania Trump documentary at the White House. Cook remained silent about the shooting until Tuesday evening, when he reportedly sent a memo to Apple employees calling for “de-escalation” and saying he had spoken to Trump about the issue.
It has become clear to many that Trump’s ICE strategy is at least as much about intimidating citizens of blue cities as it is about removing illegal immigrants. The question is and always has been: at what point will Trump’s authoritarian urges become too much for the tech industry? Barbara F. Walter, a UC San Diego political scientist and civil war expert, writes that historically, business has often prevented civil wars by demanding a more stable and secure business environment.
Technology leaders indeed are credited after convincing the Trump administration to cancel plans to move ICE agents to San Francisco last October.
AI leaders speak first
Among technology leaders, it is the heads of the leading artificial intelligence companies who have said the most about Minneapolis.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has been influential among members of Congress and people in the Trump administration, said he spoke to the president about Minneapolis on Monday, following Pretti’s death on Saturday. He wrote one Slim message to employees who say he thinks the ICE shootings have “gone too far.” However, he did not make these comments publicly. The memo, in which Altman called Trump a “very strong leader,” was leaked (intentionally or not) to The New York Times, which published it. (OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is one major Trump donor also.)
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has spoken out publicly. “We must defend our own democratic values at home, and some of what I have seen in recent days concerns me about that,” he said in a speech. a Monday night interview with Tom Llamas on NBC Nightly News. He added that Anthropic does not currently have contracts with ICE and that the shootings do not make him “more excited” about working with the agency.
In his Slack memo, Altman spoke directly (albeit unclearly) about when OpenAI will and will not speak out on social and political issues. The company will “not be blown away by changing fashions” and will not “make many performative statements about safety or politics now,” he wrote, but rather “engage with leaders and insist on our values, and speak out clearly about them when necessary.”
Amodei and Altman may have spoken out before leaders of larger tech companies, for different reasons. The research culture within AI companies has closer ties to the academic community, which may make researchers more likely to speak out on moral or political issues. Competition for AI talent is also fierce, so leaders of AI companies may react quickly, fearing the loss of valuable employees. Furthermore, AI companies are keen to project an image of social responsibility, which could reinforce the idea that they will handle the technology they develop with care.
They may also have less to lose. OpenAI and Anthropic are not publicly traded companies, so they don’t have to consider shareholder consensus when their leaders speak out on political issues. They’re also smaller than companies like Google or Apple, and they’re not as dependent on federal government contracts for revenue — at least not yet.
Listening to tech workers
The backlash against the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti didn’t start with tech executives, but with employees. Several major researchers within AI companies have denounced the ICE killings of X. Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and Microsoft chief scientific officer Eric Horvitz were among those who spoke out. Other researchers, including OpenAI’s Michael Schade and theoretical computer scientist Boaz Barak, a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, endorsed or shared the tweets. Tech superinvestors Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla and Paul Graham also condemned the killings and demanded responsibility. (Business Insider has a fuller list.)
They join a small number of technology workers who have gone public to put pressure on technology leaders. More than 800 of them signed one open letterorganized by a group called ICEOut.tech, which called on tech CEOs to demand that the Trump administration remove ICE agents from U.S. cities and terminate their companies’ contracts with the agency. The signatories include names from some of the largest technology and AI companies, including Apple, Google, Salesforce, Uber, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Big Tech’s alliance with Trump is paying off
Just half a decade ago, during the first Trump term, tech companies spoke out loudly against the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, then introduced broad new diversity policies and programs. Now that many of tech’s most influential leaders — people like Musk and venture capitalists David Sacks and Marc Andreessen — have turned so enthusiastically pro-Trump, the tech industry has taken the approach of flattering, appeasing and financing Trump in his second term. A collective response to recent events in Minnesota seems impossible.
What has changed? I doubt that the majority of the tech industry has radically changed its political views on social issues like race and policing. What has changed is AI. Following the release of ChatGPT in 2022, technology leaders could very likely see the broad transition that AI could bring, and the massive and expensive infrastructure expansion that would be required to support it. (Big Tech, AI and cloud companies are now betting hundreds of billions of dollars on building new data centers to run AI models.)
So tech leaders decided to get behind the candidate who was likely to make this possible, rather than regulate it. That was Trump, and they did it knowing that a lot of odious social policies would likely come with the deal. Major tech leaders funded Trump’s inauguration and his new White House ballroom. They visited him at Mar-a-Lago and at the White House to advise him on trade and technology policy. Some strongly defended his policies on social media. And some played a role in his administration (for example, Sacks became Trump’s “AI and crypto czar” and Musk led DOGE).
And Trump delivered. His administration – under the influence of people like Sacks, Musk and Andreessen – has made it a top priority to keep the federal government out of the way of building out the AI infrastructure. The Trump administration has stifled any chance of meaningful AI regulation most Americans are in favor) in Congress and has even tried to stop states from doing so. It has canceled federal investigations into tech companies and sought to cut red tape at the state and local level that could slow data center construction.
But the tech industry’s alliance with the MAGA crowd has never faced a threat as serious as the one from Minneapolis.
“I wonder how this regime’s eager tech enablers, including some of my former VC friends and partners, rationalize this atrocity,” says former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell. posted on X. “Just the latest in a year full of horrors. Is all the crypto and AI money in the world really worth this?”
Ordinary tech workers may not be as willing to swallow their moral scruples as top management. They are becoming increasingly sensitive to Trump’s ICE strategy and its consequences on the ground across the country. Any additional acts of violence by ICE against American citizens could exponentially further agitate workers and put further pressure on business leaders to respond in meaningful ways. If Trump persists, tech companies may ultimately have to choose between their alliance with Trump and the loyalty of their own employees.
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