Big Tech CEOs’ tortured statements on ICE in Minnesota show an industry captured by Trump
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 2 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 fired in anger and killed publicly verified U.S. citizens.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have so far said nothing on the matter. X CEO Elon Musk earlier tweeted that Renee Good had “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 was silent about the shooting until Tuesday evening, when he reportedly sent a memo to Apple employees calling for “de-escalation” and saying that he’d talked to Trump about the issue.
It’s 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 has always been: At what point will Trump’s authoritarian urges become too much for the tech industry to stomach? UC San Diego political scientist and civil war expert Barbara F. Walter writes that historically, it is the business community that often heads off civil conflict by demanding a more stable and secure business environment.
Indeed, tech leaders are credited with having persuaded the Trump administration to cancel plans to move ICE agents into San Francisco last October.
AI leaders speak first
Among tech leaders, it’s the heads of the leading artificial intelligence companies that have said the most about Minneapolis.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has been influential among members of Congress and people within the Trump administration, says he spoke to the president about Minneapolis on Monday, following Pretti’s death on Saturday. He wrote a Slack message to employees saying he believes the ICE shootings have “gone too far.” He didn’t make these comments publicly, however. The memo, in which Altman called Trump a “very strong leader,” was leaked (intentionally or otherwise) to The New York Times, which published it. (OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman has become a major Trump donor as well.)
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei did speak out publicly. “We need to defend our own democratic values at home, and some of the things I’ve seen during the last few days concern me about that,” he said in a Monday night interview with Tom Llamas on NBC Nightly News. He added that Anthropic doesn’t currently have contracts with ICE and that the shootings don’t make him “more enthusiastic” about working with the agency.
In his Slack memo, Altman spoke directly (if unclearly) to the issue of when OpenAI will, and will not, speak out on social and political issues. The company will “not get blown around by changing fashions” and will not “make a lot of performative statements now about safety or politics,” he wrote, but rather will “engage with leaders and push for our values, and speak up clearly about it as needed.”
Amodei and Altman may have spoken out before leaders of bigger tech companies did for any of several reasons. The research culture within AI companies has closer ties to the academic community, so researchers are perhaps more apt to speak out on moral or political issues. The competition for talent in AI is also fierce, so AI company leaders may be quick to respond, fearing the loss of valuable employees. Also, AI companies are eager to project an image of social responsibility, which might reinforce the idea that they’ll be careful stewards of the technology they’re developing.
They also may have less to lose. OpenAI and Anthropic are not public companies, so they don’t have to consider stockholder consensus when their leaders speak out about political issues. They are also smaller than firms like Google or Apple, and they don’t rely as much on federal government contracts for revenue—not yet, anyway.
Listening to tech workers
The backlash against the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti started not with tech executives, but with employees. Several big-name researchers within AI companies denounced the ICE killings on X. Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Anthropic cofounder 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 super-investors Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Paul Graham also condemned the murders and demanded accountability. (Business Insider has a fuller list.)
They join a small number of tech workers who have gone public to pressure tech leaders. More than 800 of them signed an open letter, organized by a group called ICEOut.tech, that called for tech CEOs to demand that the Trump administration remove ICE agents from U.S. cities and to cancel their companies’ contracts with the agency. The signatories include names from some of the biggest tech and AI companies, including Apple, Google, Salesforce, Uber, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Big Tech’s alliance with Trump is paying dividends
Only a half decade ago, during the first Trump term, tech companies spoke out loudly against the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and 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 bankrolling Trump in his second term. A unified response to the recent events in Minnesota seems impossible.
What changed? I doubt that the majority of tech industry has radically changed its political stripes on social issues like race and policing. What’s changed is AI. After the appearance of ChatGPT in 2022, tech leaders could very likely see the broad transition that AI might bring, and the massive and expensive infrastructure build-out that would be needed 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 most likely to enable it rather than regulate it. That was Trump, and they did so knowing that a lot of odious social policy would likely come with the deal. Big 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 tech policy. Some vigorously defended his policies on social media. And some took roles in his administration (Sacks became Trump’s “AI and crypto czar” and Musk led DOGE, for example).
And Trump has 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 the AI infrastructure build-out. The Trump administration has stifled any chance of any meaningful AI regulation (which most Americans favor) in Congress and has even attempted to preempt states from doing so. It has canceled federal investigations into tech companies and attempted to clear away red tape at the state and local levels that might slow data center builds.
But the tech industry’s alliance with the MAGA crowd has never faced a threat as serious as the one emerging from Minneapolis.
“Wondering how the eager tech enablers of this regime, including some of my former VC friends and partners, are rationalizing this atrocity,” former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell posted on X. “Just the latest in a year of horrors. Is all the crypto and AI money in the world really worth this?”
Rank-and-file tech workers may not be as ready to swallow their moral scruples as top management is. They’re becoming more sensitized to Trump’s ICE strategy and its consequences on the ground across the country. Every additional act of violence by ICE against American citizens could agitate workers exponentially more and further pressure company leaders to respond in meaningful ways. If Trump persists, tech companies may eventually have to choose between their alliance with Trump and the loyalty of their own employees.