Since Donald Trump Returning to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech largely aligned themselves with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, praising the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts and advocating for Trump to allow them to sell their products to China. It's been largely “business as usual” for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and tried to impose arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to worker visas for highly skilled immigrants employed by tech companies.
But after an ICE agent fatally shot an unarmed American citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, a number of tech leaders have begun to speak out publicly about the Trump administration's tactics. This includes prominent researchers from Google and Anthropic, who have labeled the killing as insensitive and immoral. The richest and most powerful tech CEOs continue to remain silent as ICE floods America's streets, but now some researchers and engineers working for them have chosen to break the ranks.
So far, more than 150 tech workers have signed a petition asking their companies' CEOs to call the White House, demand that ICE leave U.S. cities and speak out publicly against the agency's recent violence. Anne Diemer, an HR consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition, says employees from Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, Linkedin and Ripple are among those who signed. The group plans to make the list public once they reach 200 signatories.
“I think so many techies feel like they can't say anything,” Diemer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call the country's leaders and condemn ICE's actions, but even if this helps people find their people and play a small role in the fight against fascism, that's cool too.”
Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said in a lengthy post on X that Good's murder had “sparked something in him.” “A mother was shot in the street by ICE, and the government doesn't even have the decency to issue a condolence statement,” he wrote. Thorat added that the moral foundation of modern society is “tainted and festering,” and that the country is experiencing a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany, a time when people also kept quiet out of fear.
Jonathan Frankle, chief AI scientist at Databricks, added a “+1” to Thorat's post. Shrisha Radhakrishna, chief technology and chief product officer of real estate platform Opendoor, responded that what happened to Good “is not normal. It is immoral. The speed at which the government is trying to dehumanize a mother is terrifying.” Other users who identified themselves as employees at OpenAI and Anthropic also responded in support of Thorat.
Shortly after Good was shot, Jeff Dean, an early Google employee and University of Minnesota graduate who is now chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, began resharing posts with his 400,000 followers criticizing the Trump administration's immigration tactics, including one outlining circumstances in which deadly force is not justified for police officers who encounter moving vehicles.
He then weighed himself. “This is absolutely not okay, and we cannot become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional actions by government agencies,” Dean wrote in a Jan. 10 X-post. “The last few days have been terrible.” He linked to a video of a teenager — identified as a U.S. citizen — being forcibly arrested at a Target in Richfield, Minnesota.
In response to US Vice President JD Vance's claim on He included a screenshot of a Justice Department web page detailing best practices for law enforcement officers dealing with suspects in moving vehicles.
