Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs condemn ICE violence, praise Trump

[highplainsdem]

Source: TechCrunch

On a Monday night NBC News segment, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expressed concern over “some of the things we’ve seen in the last few days,” referring to the violence of Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis.

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Meanwhile, in an internal Slack message to OpenAI employees that got leaked to the New York Times, Sam Altman said, “What’s happening with ICE is going too far.”

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While Amodei and Altman may be taking something of a stand – one in public, the other internally – both CEOs couched their statements with praise for President Trump, as well.

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Whether these CEOs are doing everything that some among their workforce want them to do remains to be seen. Still, given what’s at stake for their companies, even internal and mild-mannered critiques are notable.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/27/anthropic-and-openai-ceos-condemn-ice-violence-praise-trump/

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Not that notable. Especially since the article points out they've been more critical of Trump.

Altman in particular, since he posted this in 2016, before Trump was elected the first time:

https://blog.samaltman.com/trump

To anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the 1930s, it's chilling to watch Trump in action. Though I know intellectually it’s easy in hard economic times to rile people up with a hatred of outsiders, it's still surprising to watch this happen right in front of us.

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Demagogic hate-mongers lead down terrible paths. It would be particularly embarrassing for us to fall for this—we are a nation of immigrants, and we know that immigrants built this country (and Trump, of course, is the grandson of immigrants and married to an immigrant).

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I take some risk by writing this (even though I’ve supported some Republicans in the past), and I’ll feel bad if I end up hurting Y Combinator by doing so. I understand why other people in the technology industry aren’t saying much. In an ordinary election it's reasonable for people in the business world to remain publicly neutral. But this is not an ordinary election.

In the words of Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." This would be a good time for us all—even Republicans, especially Republican politicians who previously endorsed Trump—to start speaking up.