While many tech workers protested President Donald Trump's policies during his first term, Silicon Valley's rank and file has been quieter over the past year as their bosses genuflect to his administration. But that may be changing following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Last week, following the killing of Good, more than 200 Silicon Valley staffers published a letter urging tech leaders to use their platforms to call for ICE's removal from U.S. cities. As of Tuesday, following the killing of Pretti, the letter has more than 450 signatories, including employees from Google, Amazon and TikTok. The letter argues that tech leaders have a unique ability to influence Trump.

The killing of George Floyd in 2020 prompted a wave of statements from tech companies and CEOs. Today, pushback against ICE is largely coming from employees, not executives. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech have mostly fallen in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, heaping praise upon the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts, and pleading for Trump's permission to sell their products to China . It's been mostly business as usual for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and attempted to slap arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to worker visas for high-skilled immigrants employed by tech firms. But after an ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, a number of tech leaders have begun publicly speaking out about the Trump administration's tactics.

Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? In the past few weeks, many tech leaders have made bold predictions about what AI will achieve in 2026, from mastering the field of biology to surpassing human intelligence outright . But in 2026's first week, the most visible use of AI has been X users employing Grok to digitally disrobe women. Elon Musk's platform X has been flooded with nonconsensual AI-created images, requested by users, of unclothed or scantily-clad women, men and children, sometimes in sexual positions.

Donald Trump's AI summit in Washington this week was a fanfare-filled event catered to the tech elite. The president took the stage on Wednesday evening, as the song God Bless the USA piped over the loudspeakers, and then he decreed: "America must once again be a country where innovators are rewarded with a green light, not strangled with red tape, so they can't move, so they can't breathe." The message was clear – the tech regulatory environment that was once the focus of federal lawmakers is no longer. "I've been watching for many years," Trump continued. I've been a victim of regulation."

Jesse Armstrong loves to pull fictional stories out of reality. His universally acclaimed TV show Succession, for instance, was inspired by real-life media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Hearsts. Mountainhead, which releases on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m. ET, portrays four top tech executives who retreat to a Utah hideaway as the AI deepfake tools newly released by one of their companies wreak havoc across the world. As the believable deepfakes inflame hatred on social media and real-world violence, the comfortably-appointed quartet mulls a global governmental takeover, intergalactic conquest and immortality, before interpersonal conflict derails their plans. Armstrong tells TIME in a Zoom interview that he first became interested in writing a story about tech titans after reading books like Michael Lewis' Going Infinite (about Sam Bankman-Fried) and Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as well as journalistic profiles of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. He then built the story around the interplay between four character archetypes--the father, the dynamo, the usurper, and the hanger-on--and conducted extensive research so that his fictional executives reflected real ones.

Fox News congressional correspondent Aishah Hasnie has more on who will be in attendance and policies President-elect Donald Trump will enact during his first day in office on'Special Report.' President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration guest list will include some of America's most influential billionaires, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos--signaling a sharp political shift among the tech industry's biggest players. Silicon Valley, traditionally a stronghold for left-leaning ideals, has largely embraced Trump following the November election. The incoming president amassed a record-breaking inaugural fund with substantial donations from tech executives. The heads of companies such as Google, OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and Microsoft have also forked over millions to fund inaugural events, including parades and swanky parties.

Nvidia is developing real-world robots that are equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities. PUSH BACK: The new rule, which industry leaders say could come as early as the end of this week, effectively seeks to shore up the U.S. economy and national security efforts by adding new restrictions on how many U.S.-made artifical intelligence products can be deployed across the globe. Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, March 18, 2024. 'UTTERLY UNTRUE': Open AI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday responded to a lawsuit in which his sister accused him of sexually abusing her for nearly a decade. Altman, along with his mother and two brothers, issued a joint statement denying the claims of his sister, Ann Altman.

Leaders in the tech industry are urging the Biden administration not to add a new regulation that will limit artificial intelligence exports, citing concerns it is overbroad and could diminish the United States' global dominance in AI. The new rule, which industry leaders say could come as early as the end of this week, effectively seeks to shore up the U.S. economy and national security efforts by adding new restrictions on how many U.S.-made artifical intelligence products can be deployed across the globe. "A rule of this nature would cede the global market to U.S. competitors who will be eager to fill the untapped demand created by placing arbitrary constraints on U.S. companies' ability to sell basic computing systems overseas," stated a Monday letter from Jason Oxman, the president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), sent to Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo. "Should the U.S. lose its advantage in the global AI ecosystem, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to regain in the future." FBI'S NEW WARNING ABOUT AI-DRIVEN SCAMS THAT ARE AFTER YOUR CASH The process to place new export controls on artificial intelligence goes back to October 2022, when the Biden administration's Commerce Department first released an updated export framework aimed at slowing the progress of Chinese military programs. Details of the new incoming export controls surfaced after the Biden administration called on American tech company NVIDIA to stop selling certain computer chips to China the following month.

Tech solutionism, as identified by Moss and Metcalf,7 is the notion that all problems have tractable technical fixes. We see variants in the naming and definition of this phenomenon: the technology imperative,8 or "the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability",4 or even old-fashioned technocracy itself. All versions designate a confident deployment of technology to solve a non-technical problem, with costs and other drawbacks reduced to secondary consideration. A certain Tech Leader promotes a new startup, Sunshine, thus: "… by applying AI … you can both solve valuable problems and you can give people back time. You can also build their confidence in AI."6

If California is the political fundraising powerhouse of the nation, Silicon Valley has grown into one of the increasingly dominant forces of campaign cash. And while Northern California tech entrepreneurs overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, a small but powerful group of defectors has moved rightward in recent years. A gathering of tech's conservative cohort enjoyed a visit from former President Trump on Thursday evening at a tony fundraiser held at venture capitalist David Sacks' San Francisco home. The estate, nestled on Billionaires' Row in Pacific Heights, welcomed about 80 elites to the sold-out event. Cost of admission: up to 300,000 per person and 500,000 per couple, according to an invitation obtained by The Times.