Silicon Valley Doesn't Get Why You Hate AI Technology leaders don't seem to understand society's gripes about AI, but boy, are they posting through it. Silicon Valley is trying to make sense of the growing backlash against artificial intelligence, but so far, it's not going that well. The inconvenient truth is that a significant portion of the world is not optimistic about the technology they're building. But recent attempts to diagnose the root of the problem by CEOs like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic's Dario Amodei indicate they don't understand what's actually driving society's disdain for AI. The rest of popular culture, meanwhile, is finding ways to capitalize on AI hate. Just look at this new commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer.

The Moonshot AI stand at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. The Moonshot AI stand at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. China's tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House O ver the past month, a series of advancements in China's artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing and robotics technologies have rattled financial markets, caused divisions among US tech moguls and left the Trump administration scrambling to respond. Silicon Valley has long pointed to China's tech industry as a competitive threat and used its growth as rationale for why US firms should not face regulatory oversight that could slow them down. In recent weeks, however, China's progress has pushed US tech CEOs past vague warnings and into open disagreement over how to address Chinese-made products upending their industry.

Silicon Valley is making a show of helping prepare the country for AI layoffs. In late March, I started receiving daily texts from the federal government about AI. " AI is changing how we work and live," one message read. "You might feel curious, skeptical, or unsure--that's normal." I had enrolled in an AI-literacy course from the Labor Department created to help workers succeed in the ChatGPT economy. The weeklong program, created in partnership with an AI start-up and delivered by text message, was supposed to equip Americans with "foundational AI skills," according to an agency press release.

The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

Less than a decade ago, Google employees scuttled any military use of its AI. The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war - and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley's rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech's answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago. Anthropic's feud with the Trump administration escalated three days ago as the AI firm sued the Department of Defense, claiming that the government's decision to blacklist it from government work violated its first amendment rights. The company and the Pentagon have been locked in a months-long standoff, with Anthropic attempting to prohibit its AI model from being used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.

San Francisco's AI startups are pushing workers to grind endlessly, hinting at pressures soon hitting other sectors Not long after the terms "996" and "grindcore" entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn't taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she'd given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking their shoes off in the office because, well, if you were going to be there for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, wouldn't you rather be wearing slippers? "If you go to a cafe on a Sunday, everyone is working," says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action.

He Did PR for Zuckerberg, Musk, and Google. Now He Says He'Only Told Half the Story' Thirty thousand feet in the air, Mark Zuckerberg turned to his speechwriter. The duo were flying in Zuckerberg's jet to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the Facebook boss was scheduled to address world leaders. Zuckerberg had a question for his companion. "Wait, what exactly is the UN?" Dex Hunter-Torricke had to hide his surprise. Zuckerberg was, by this point in 2015, the head of a company that was reshaping politics and societies around the world, with 1.5 billion users and counting.

We asked attendees of Super Bowl LX's pregame festivities for their takes on the competing halftime shows, the potential for ICE actions, and the influence of Silicon Valley on the event. To say this year's Super Bowl came at a charged time in American culture and politics is, perhaps, an understatement. While the pair of teams who took the field Sunday--the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots--comprised a pretty classic matchup (no underdogs here!), the rest of the event was set to be anything but. Santa Clara's Levi's Stadium is in the heart of Silicon Valley, just a few miles from the corporate headquarters of Nvidia and AMD, whose chips are powering the AI arms race that had competitors OpenAI and Anthropic sparring via rival Super Bowl ads . There was an explosion in sports "trading" activity on sites like Kalshi and Polymarket in the lead-up to the game, even in states like California where traditional sports betting is illegal. Sunday could prove to be an extraordinary success for prediction markets, as the industry becomes more mainstream . Fresh off a historic Grammy Album of the Year win (a first for a Spanish-language album), the unapologetically political Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny headlined --a choice that sparked a perhaps inevitable MAGA backlash. Meanwhile, Turning Point USA organized an alternative program called The All-American Halftime Show, featuring the likes of Kid Rock and Brantley Gilbert. Never mind that Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, and therefore an American citizen. Rumors were even buzzing about possible actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Super Bowl. Even though the NFL and California governor Gavin Newsom said on Thursday that there would be " no immigration enforcement tied to the game," anti-ICE protesters were on the streets. We caught up with football fans at a tailgate five minutes away from Levi's Stadium to hear their thoughts on all the drama. Here's what they had to say.

Founders used to be wedded to their companies. Now, anyone can be lured away for the right price. Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI "acqui-hires" in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq's inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers. The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs.

Even as Big Tech CEOs curry favor with President Trump, Silicon Valley employees are calling on their bosses to use their influence to help stop his immigration policies. The first Trump administration, and the tech industry that stood up to it, are both looking quainter by the day. Here's one example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders instituting a travel ban on foreigners from certain countries (predominantly Muslim-majority ones), people from across the United States vigorously protested the policy. They included some of tech's most elite: Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who joined a demonstration at the San Francisco airport; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who wrote a company-wide email outlining "legal options" that Amazon was considering to fight the ban; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took to Instagram to describe his own family's immigrant roots. On Saturday, hours after federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, several prominent tech executives attended a private White House screening of, a documentary being released by (of course) Amazon MGM Studios. The timing was not lost on the group of Silicon Valley workers who recently launched ICEout.tech The letter, posted following Renee Nicole Good's killing earlier this month, has now been signed by more than 1,000 tech employees. Those workers, who come from across the spectrum of Big Tech companies and startups, are asking that executives use their clout to demand Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave American cities, that they cancel company contracts with the agency, and that they speak publicly about ICE's violent and deadly tactics. Worker-led demands like those were commonplace during Trump 1.0, when tech employees at the world's biggest companies often spoke out--internally and externally--about the cruelty of the US administration and the industry's role in facilitating or tempering its most craven policies. Meanwhile, the executives leading those companies have been busy kissing the ring-- over dinner at the White House or with outlandishly expensive documentaries nobody's watching--at every opportunity. Is the dam finally breaking? This week, Silicon Valley leaders including Anthropic heads Dario and Daniela Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook finally spoke out about ICE's outrageous overreach.