AI workers are speaking out about the Minnesota killing
Employees of Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic are publicly criticizing the Trump administration after Saturday’s shooting — but their bosses are staying quiet.
In the wake of Saturday’s killing of a civilian by federal border patrol agents, AI workers have begun to speak out — even while their bosses remain silent.
“The tech tide turned this weekend,” said ICEout.Tech, a group of anti-ICE tech workers. The shift is indeed noticeable: the AI industry, which has often stayed conspicuously quiet about the Trump administration’s many misdeeds, was louder this weekend.
The shooting of Alex Pretti in Minnesota appears to have been the last straw for many in the AI industry — the trigger to openly criticize the administration and, in some cases, their own bosses.
Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, was one of the earliest to speak out. “This is absolutely shameful,” he said in response to a video of Saturday’s killing. “Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”
Other Googlers, including Adam Roberts, Peyman Milanfar, Edward Grefenstette and Andrew Marmon, quickly backed Dean up. “‘They had already disarmed him’ is the key fact here. Then they executed him. It’s shameful. No matter what side you’re on, what happened today is unacceptable,” said Kath Korevec, director of product at Google Labs.
At Anthropic, a post from co-founder and interpretability research lead Chris Olah, saying that “recent events — a federal agent killing an ICU nurse for seemingly no reason and with no provocation — shock the conscience,” was widely reshared by Olah’s colleagues.
OpenAI workers spoke up too, with strategic projects lead Michael Schade and alignment researcher Boaz Barak approvingly sharing Jeff Dean’s post. Will Depue said that “we cannot accept that it is now ‘pragmatic’ to expect that the police may tackle, arrest, and execute us for observing their behavior while exercising our constitutional rights to carry a firearm.”
Joshua Achiam, the company’s head of mission alignment, said “what’s going on in Minnesota is pretty beyond the pale,” adding that “if state and federal officials don’t figure out how to climb down from this level of violence and provocation, the wound in our national unity will be hard to recover from. Everyone needs to recalibrate their approach.” (He later clarified: “I didn’t claim wrongdoing on the part of state officials and I’m not trying to make a both sides argument here.”)
Others at OpenAI criticized the shooting less directly: Caitlin Kalinowski, who leads the company’s robotics efforts, pointedly shared a list of constitutional amendments that the Trump administration has violated; while well-known account roon said “stephen-millerism has got to go.”
James Dyett, who works on OpenAI’s global business team, noted the silence of others: “There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets.”
One example of such silence? OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who was the biggest donor to Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. in the second-half of last year. Brockman said nothing about the weekend’s shooting, instead commenting on AI coding tools (“i always loved programming but am loving the new world even more.”)
Some OpenAI employees addressed their leader’s actions directly. “Greg is phenomenal, technically and otherwise. I feel so honored to be able to work with him every day,” said Aidan Clark, who works on OpenAI’s math team. “I don’t agree with (some) of his politics, but I also don’t believe by helping make OpenAI succeed I am helping make Trump succeed (in fact often the opposite!).”
“I hope a day like today makes Greg reconsider his politics. I also believe that someone’s politics shouldn’t immediately transfer to their work (even if leader). I think those saying otherwise haven’t thought through the repercussions of that world!”
“If one day I wake up and feel that by working at OpenAI I am making the world worse (by supporting Trump, or by any other means) I will stop working here,” Clark concluded. “I do not feel that way, and Greg’s support of someone I dislike does not change that!”
Clark’s post was endorsed by his colleague Adam Goldberg, one of the company’s loudest voices on X. (Goldberg separately criticized the government’s actions and the societal response.)
It isn’t just Brockman who has been silent. While some prominent AI researchers, including Yann LeCun and François Chollet, have spoken out, major AI CEOs have universally kept quiet.
Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella and Mustafa Suleyman have thus far said nothing publicly about the shooting. (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Anthropic donated to Trump’s inauguration committee last year, as did Altman.) Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and AMD’s Lisa Su even visited the White House on Saturday evening to watch a documentary about Melania Trump.
Given the industry’s need for government support — and Trump’s penchant for punishing those who cross him — that is no surprise, depressing as it may be. The question, though, is whether employee pressure and the reality of the Trump administration’s actions forces the CEOs’ hands. As of Monday morning, more than 450 tech workers, including AI company employees, had signed a letter urging their CEOs to cancel ICE contracts, speak out publicly, and pressure the White House to pull ICE out of cities.
Many in AI will no doubt want to stay quiet, wishing that they could just focus on their research rather than getting dragged into the mind-killing field that is politics. But as Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner notes, it may be in researchers’ own self-interest to speak out: “It’ll be pretty hard to do good research in a ‘masked men execute civilians on the street’ political environment.”
Hey, great read as always. So good to see the AI world finally speaking out. Gonna stand tall for what's right, like in Pilates.
Dario ended up saying something