More than 450 tech workers from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have signed a letter urging their CEOs to condemn operations by the federal agency, cancel any company ICE contracts, and demand the federal agency leave U.S. cities. The letter follows the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis on Saturday, less than three weeks after a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good in the same city.

The letter was issued by an organization called IceOut.Tech and is signed by employees from companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and Salesforce.

While many of the top tech CEOs have kept mum about Pretti’s death (Apple's Tim Cook in particular has come under scathing attack for attending a movie about Melania Trump at the White House on the night of Prietti's death), a growing number of tech industry insiders have begun to speak out, including Google DeepMind's Jeff Dean, Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and Signal's Meredith Whittaker.

Since Trump’s election victory in 2024, many tech leaders have actively sought closer ties with the administration. CEOs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg attended the president's inauguration in 2025 and made various donations to his inauguration fund; and some Big Tech companies have helped fund Trump’s construction of a ballroom in the White House’s East Wing. The letter argues that the tech industry already has proven leverage, pointing to the pressure put on the Trump administration when he threatened to send the National Guard to San Francisco in October, a threat the administration ultimately didn't carry out. "We can and must use our leverage to end this violence," the letter states. –Beatrice Nolan

A year and a half after publishing an optimistic tome about how AI could transform the world for the better, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is back with a far more serious and bleak manifesto called “The Adolescence of Technology.” It’s a 38-page treatise intended to “jolt people awake” to the imminent challenges of AI: “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”

The hour of reckoning is fast approaching, he says, noting that AI now writes much of the code at Anthropic, which is accelerating the creation of the next generation of AI systems. “This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.” 

Anthropic’s staff is preparing for the consequences. "All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of our wealth,” and Anthropic’s staff have committed to donate company shares worth billions, Amodei says. He also says, “it may be feasible to pay human employees even long after they are no longer providing economic value in the traditional sense,” with Anthropic currently exploring “a range of possible pathways” for its employees to be announced in the near future.

Still, the irony is striking, even for a company founded on concerns about AI safety. While Amodei frames AI as a civilization-shaking technology, Anthropic is marketing it to CFOs and CIOs as a better way to write emails, summarize PDFs, and shave minutes off the workday – a remarkable blend of existential angst and commercial zeal.