Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech have largely adjusted to the fresh regime, attend dinners with officials, praise the administration, present gifts to the president generous giftsand begging Trump to allow him to sell his products to China. For the past year, everything has been business as usual in Silicon Valley, even as the administration ignored a number of constitutional norms and tried to impose arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to work visas for high-skilled immigrants hired by tech companies.
But after an ICE agent shot and killed unarmed U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, many tech leaders began speaking publicly about the Trump administration’s tactics. This includes prominent researchers from Google and Anthropic, who condemned the killing as callous and immoral. The richest and most powerful technology CEOs continue to remain still as ICE floods American streets, but now some of the researchers and engineers working for them have decided to step out of line.
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, a human resources consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition, says those who signed the petition included employees of Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, Linkedin and Rippling. The group plans to publish the list once it reaches 200 signatories.
“I think so many tech professionals felt like they didn’t have a voice,” Diemer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call the country’s leaders and condemn ICE’s actions, but even if it helps people find their people and take a small part in the fight against fascism, that’s cool too.”
Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, wrote in a lengthy post on X that Good’s killing “triggered something inside him.” “ICE shot a mother in the street and the government doesn’t even have the decency to express condolences in writing,” he wrote. Thorat added that the moral foundations of newfangled society are “infected and festering” and the country is experiencing a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany – a time when people also remained still out of fear.
Jonathan Frankle, chief artificial intelligence scientist at Databricks, added a “+1” to Thorat’s post. Shrisha Radhakrishna, chief technology officer and chief product officer of real estate platform Opendoor, responded that what happened to Good “is not normal. It is immoral. The speed with which the administration is moving to dehumanize a mother is appalling.” Other users who identified themselves as OpenAI and Anthropic employees also responded in support of Thorat.
Shortly after Good was shot, Jeff Dean, a former Google employee and University of Minnesota graduate who is now a principal scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, began sharing posts with his 400,000 X followers criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration tactics, including one outlining circumstances in which the operate of deadly force is not justified when police officers are interacting with moving vehicles.
Then he weighed himself. “This is completely wrong and we cannot remain numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional actions by government agencies,” Dean wrote in X’s Jan. 10 post. “The last few days have been terrifying.” He provided a link to a video of a teenager – identified as a US citizen – being brutally arrested at a Target in Richfield, Minnesota.
In response to the request of US Vice President JD Vance claim in the Added a screenshot from Department of Justice website outlining best practices for law enforcement officers when dealing with suspects in moving vehicles.