Monday, February 09, 2026
Trump’s Oil Grab in Venezuela Shatters an American Taboo - The New York Times
Trump’s Oil Grab in Venezuela Shatters an American Taboo
"U.S. presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But President Trump has asserted a U.S. right to take it.
President George W. Bush said he was invading Iraq to keep America safe. But critics saw a hidden motive: oil.
“No blood for oil!” became a global rallying cry, and Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, accused Mr. Bush of seeking “to control the Middle East oil.”
The Bush administration rejected the charge and was determined to refute it. After invading and occupying Iraq in March 2003, Bush officials were careful to leave Iraqis in control of their oil industry, and they never sought special treatment for American firms.
As foreign investors moved in, the biggest winners by far were not U.S. companies but Chinese ones.
American presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But while the United States has built relationships and even intervened abroad for oil, it has never simply seized control of another country’s oil reserves.
“I can’t think of a military operation that the U.S. engaged in to actually take oil from anybody,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security.
Until now.
Immediately after U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January, President Trump announced plans to take control of the country’s oil industry.
Since then, Mr. Trump has forced Venezuela’s government to begin “turning over” as many as 50 million barrels for sale by the United States and is pressuring American firms to start drilling in the country, which sits on the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
“The people of the United States are going to be big beneficiaries,” Mr. Trump said at the White House last month. (Mr. Trump says that some oil revenue will be returned to Venezuela, but not how much.)
Venezuela’s parliament passed legislation in late January opening the country’s mostly state-run oil sector to more foreign investment, a decision critics note was made as U.S. warships floated near Venezuela’s coast.
“You are taking their oil at gunpoint,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a hearing in late January. Mr. Trump is selling “stolen oil,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, has charged.
Mr. Trump’s fixation with Venezuelan crude is somewhat puzzling, given that global oil prices are relatively low, and that the United States is now a net energy exporter no longer dependent on foreign oil supplies.
Despite that, analysts say that Mr. Trump is confirming some of the worst suspicions about U.S. motives worldwide. He also risks infuriating ordinary Venezuelans, who could oppose American efforts to drill their oil — possibly with violence — and resist a political alignment with Washington.
“One lesson that emerged from Iraq,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, a former Bush administration official who worked closely on Iraq policy, “was how toxic the oil narrative can be — and how potent it can be in fomenting anti-Americanism.”
Critics say Mr. Trump’s plan revives bitter memories of colonial exploitation and flagrantly violates international law, including a 1974 United Nations resolution that asserts that every country has full rights to “all its wealth, natural resources and economic activities.”
In China, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said last month that Mr. Trump was “bullying” Venezuela to give up its oil. Spain joined with five Latin American countries, including Mexico and Brazil, in denouncing “the external appropriation” of Venezuela’s natural resources as illegal.
Mr. Trump has sought to turn the tables, charging that Venezuela “took our oil away from us” and “stole our assets” in 2007 when it increased state control over its oil industry and forced two of the three U.S. companies operating in the country to abandon their projects at considerable expense.
Whether that is Mr. Trump’s true motivation is unclear. He has asserted a U.S. right to “take the oil” from other countries, from Iraq to Syria to Libya, although he has not previously done so.
That is a sharp break from decades of precedent, Ms. O’Sullivan said.
“America has, by and large, focused on ensuring access to oil and the smooth functioning of global oil markets — which is different from physical control of oil,” she said.
Oil has shaped U.S. foreign policy at least since 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on imperial Japan to check its aggression in Asia. Japan responded by attacking Pearl Harbor, which dragged the United States into World War II.
The war’s industrial nature showed that national security depended on access to oil. By 1946, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were warning about the risk of “an oil-starved war” should the United States lose access to Middle East supplies. That mind-set gave birth to America’s courtship of Saudi Arabia, where huge oil reserves were discovered in 1938.
Iran also emerged at the time as a major Western oil supplier. But a crisis erupted in 1951 when Iran’s new prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized his country’s oil industry. Worried that Mr. Mossadegh could cut off the West and “deny Iranian oil to the free world,” as a National Security Council policy memo later put it, the Eisenhower administration joined with Britain, which had lost a major oil stake in Iran, in fomenting a 1953 coup that overthrew the Iranian leader.
The United States did not try to seize control of Iranian oil, however. The N.S.C. memo, written a few months after the coup, said the U.S. government should help Iran remain an “independent” nation, in part by supporting the development of its oil industry.
It was a case where national interest and profit motive overlapped. American and British oil companies would profit handsomely after the coup from doing business with Iran’s pro-Western shah, as noted by critics who cite the episode as proof of American greed and treachery.
After decades of official U.S. denials, the C.I.A. in 2013 finally admitted its role in toppling Mr. Mossadegh.
Blood for Oil
In his 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter made a dramatic declaration: America would fight a war for oil.
“Our excessive dependence on foreign oil is a clear and present danger to our nation’s security,” Mr. Carter explained. Thus, any attempt by an outside power to control the Persian Gulf and its oil “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,” and would “be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
The Carter Doctrine, as that position came to be known, was prompted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan months earlier. U.S. officials worried that Soviet troops might continue west, into the oil fields of neighboring Iran.
That did not happen. But a decade later, the United States would launch its first oil war.
In August 1990, Iraq invaded its oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. President George H.W. Bush quickly decided to respond with force. He argued that it was vital to defend global order. But he did not hide his economic motive to free Kuwait’s oil fields from Mr. Hussein’s control. “We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless,” Mr. Bush said.
His secretary of state, James A. Baker, explained why: “If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s ‘jobs.’”
After U.S. forces liberated Kuwait, Mr. Bush made no effort to take control of any oil. He even declined grateful Kuwaiti offers of preferential treatment for American oil companies.
“The U.S. could have commandeered Iraqi or Kuwaiti oil and didn’t,” Mr. Fontaine said.
Iraq: W.M.D. or Oil?
Even so, when Mr. Bush’s son George W. invaded Iraq in 2003, many skeptics dismissed his main rationale — a false claim that Mr. Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction — as a cover story for the secret goal of controlling Iraq’s oil.
Fueling the suspicion was Mr. Bush’s past as a former Texas oil man; his vice president, Dick Cheney, had run the energy giant Halliburton.
Bush officials disputed the charge. “That’s just not what the United States does,” Mr. Bush’s defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, told an interviewer shortly before the invasion. “We never have, and we never will.”
A litany of shifting explanations and misstatements from Bush administration officials invited doubts about their motives. But experts say there is extensive evidence showing that U.S. officials never tried to commandeer Iraq’s oil or win special treatment for American firms, and actually took steps to limit their own role in the country’s postwar oil industry.
“This idea that the war was meant to be a permanent oil grab is false,” said Emily Meierding, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of “The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict.”
Before the invasion, she said, a team of White House officials drew up plans for Iraq’s oil industry. “They were very clear that Iraq’s resources belonged to the people of Iraq, that oil production should belong to the Iraqis and that the U.S. should transfer control to the Iraqi people as soon as possible,” Ms. Meierding said, noting that she was speaking only for herself and not her institution.
American companies including Exxon Mobil did sign early contracts with the country’s new government. But high risks and disappointing results caused them to retreat. (Exxon Mobil recently signed a deal to return to Iraq.)
But their Chinese rivals moved aggressively, and the dominant player in Iraq’s oil sector today is the China National Petroleum Corporation.
A Lesson for Venezuela
The mere perception that America was stealing Iraq’s oil inflicted severe damage there, Ms. O’Sullivan said, helping to fuel a bloody insurgency against American forces and undermining public trust in Iraq’s U.S.-backed government.
That might be a cautionary lesson for Mr. Trump. U.S. oil executives already say the risks and costs of doing business in Venezuela are daunting. Those obstacles could grow if Mr. Trump’s approach angers Venezuelans who might otherwise be sympathetic to the United States.
The Venezuelan people “are extremely sensitive to any perception of foreign exploitation,” Ms. Meierding said. “So they’re going to want their industry to revive, and they know they’ll need foreign investment. But they are not going to accept direct U.S. control, at least for the long term.”
Ms. Meierding suggested what may be the main reason countries do not wage wars for oil more often.
“People will resist an occupation for their resources, and resist forcefully,” she said.
Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 8, 2026, Section A, Page 10 of the New York editionwith the headline: Trump, in Seizure of Venezuela’s Oil, Goes Beyond Iran Coup and Iraq War. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
More on the U.S. Involvement in Venezuela
On January 3, the U.S. military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife in a strike on Caracas, the culmination of a campaign to oust Maduro from power.
Opposition Figures: Hours after at least 35 political prisoners were released, one of the most prominent, Juan Pablo Guanipa, was apparently back in custody, raising doubts about the government’s direction and control.
Latest Boat Strike: A U.S. military strike blew up a boat suspected of moving drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people, the U.S. Southern Command said. The strikes have claimed 128 lives, according to a tracker maintained by The New York Times.
Maduro Allies Targeted by the U.S.: Venezuelan security agents have questioned two prominent businessmen who have faced money laundering charges in the United States, according to five Venezuelans and a U.S. official. The move against the men, with ties to the deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, signaled a deepening cooperation between the two countries.
A Mini-Caracas: Generations of migrants from a village on the coast of southern Italy found a better life in Venezuela. Many came back and turned their town into a slice of Caracas flourishing in an unlikely spot.
Computer Warfare: The United States used cyberweapons in Venezuela to take power offline, turn off radar and disrupt hand-held radios, all to help U.S. military forces slip into the country unnoticed early this month, part of a renewed effort to integrate computer warfare into real-world operations.
Wrongful Death Lawsuit: Relatives of two Trinidadian men the U.S. military apparently killed in a boat strike filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, bringing the first legal challenge in an American court to President Trump’s policy of targeting vessels suspected of smuggling drugs at sea."
Trump Live Updates: Epstein Files, DHS Funding and More - The New York Times
Trump Administration Live Updates: Epstein’s Longtime Companion Refuses to Answer Lawmakers’ Questions
"Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, invoked her Fifth Amendment rights during a House Oversight Committee deposition. The committee is investigating her pursuit of clemency from President Trump. Meanwhile, Congress remains divided over funding the Department of Homeland Security, with Democrats pushing for restrictions on immigration enforcement operations, a proposal rejected by Republicans.
What We’re Covering Today
Epstein Files: Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a federal sex-trafficking sentence, invoked her Fifth Amendment right in response to every question asked during a deposition before the House Oversight Committee on Monday, according to the committee’s chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky. Separately, several members of Congress were set to view unredacted versions of the Justice Department’s files on Mr. Epstein. Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who helped write the law requiring their release, will be among them. Read more ›
Immigration Crackdown: With five days until stopgap funding for the Homeland Security Department runs out, Congress appears no closer to keeping the department running past Friday. Democrats have demanded new restrictions on immigration enforcement operations as a condition for supporting a new spending bill, and Republicans have rejected those proposals as an unrealistic wish list. Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, told Fox News on Sunday that he did not expect an agreement. Read more ›
Feb. 9, 2026, 10:49 a.m. ET
Representative Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia, one of the Democrats on the Oversight Committee, condemned Ghislaine Maxwell’s pursuit of clemency during her deposition, but also faulted President Trump for not shutting down the idea. “She is campaigning over and over again to get that pardon from President Trump, and this president has not ruled it out,” he said. “And so that is why she is continuing to not cooperate with our investigation.”
Feb. 9, 2026, 10:36 a.m. ET
Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is currently serving a federal prison sentence on sex-trafficking charges, invoked her Fifth Amendment right in response to every question asked during a deposition before the House Oversight Committee on Monday, according to Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the committee’s chairman. Comer said a lawyer for Maxwell, who appeared virtually from a prison in Texas, told lawmakers in his opening statement that Maxwell “would answer questions if she were granted clemency.”
Feb. 9, 2026, 8:23 a.m. ET
The House Oversight Committee will this morning depose Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is in prison on federal sex-trafficking charges.
Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, is expected to invoke her her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions, according to Democratic members of the committee.
Feb. 9, 2026, 8:23 a.m. ET
Several members of Congress will view unredacted versions of the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein today. Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky and one of the authors of the law that required the release of the files, announced his plans in a social media post. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, also plans to view the files today, according to the committee’s staff.
As a Friday deadline to fund the Department of Homeland Security approaches, Democrats and Republicans appeared no closer on Sunday to a deal to keep the department running.
“If I had to say now, I probably would expect there is a shutdown,” said Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
President Trump denounced Bad Bunny over his Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, complaining that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying” after the largely Spanish-language performance.
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the Puerto Rican superstar musician better known as Bad Bunny, has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration. Just days ago at the Grammy Awards, he declared “ICE out” — referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who have been the face of Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown — while accepting an award.
The 232 Americans competing at the Winter Games have trained for years, traveled thousands of miles and are ready to give their best on the ice and snow in northern Italy. But politics, perhaps inevitably, is intruding on their Olympic moment.
The competition has opened after a year in which the Trump administration denigrated Europe, threatened allies and began an immigration crackdown at home that incited outrage, including in Italy. That opposition has followed the U.S. team as its members compete on the Olympic stage, forcing athletes, coaches and American fans to respond to — or sidestep — the backlash."
Trump Live Updates: Epstein Files, DHS Funding and More - The New York Times
The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US | Winter Olympics 2026 | The Guardian
The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US | Winter Olympics 2026 | The Guardian
During the Winter Olympics in Milan, US Vice President JD Vance was booed by the crowd, but this was not shown on NBC’s US broadcast. This incident highlights the growing difficulty for broadcasters to control narratives in a world where multiple perspectives are instantly accessible. As the US prepares to host the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics, this raises concerns about how political dissent will be handled during these events.
The modern Olympics sell themselves on a simple premise: the whole world, watching the same moment, at the same time. On Friday night in Milan, that illusion fractured in real time.
When Team USA entered San Siro during the parade of nations, the speed skater Erin Jackson led the delegation into a wall of cheers. Moments later, when cameras cut to US vice-president JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance, large sections of the crowd responded with boos. Not subtle ones, but audible and sustained ones. Canadian viewers heard them. Journalists seated in the press tribunes in the upper deck, myself included, clearly heard them. But as I quickly realized from a groupchat with friends back home, American viewers watching NBC did not.
On its own, the situation might once have passed unnoticed. But the defining feature of the modern sports media landscape is that no single broadcaster controls the moment any more. CBC carried it. The BBC liveblogged it. Fans clipped it. Within minutes, multiple versions of the same happening were circulating online – some with boos, some without – turning what might once have been a routine production call into a case study in information asymmetry.
For its part, NBC has denied editing the crowd audio, although it is difficult to resolve why the boos so audible in the stadium and on other broadcasts were absent for US viewers. But in a broader sense, it is becoming harder, not easier, to curate reality when the rest of the world is holding up its own camera angles. And that raises an uncomfortable question as the United States moves toward hosting two of the largest sporting events on the planet: the 2026 men’s World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
If a US administration figure is booed at the Olympics in Los Angeles, or a World Cup match in New Jersey or Dallas, will American domestic broadcasts simply mute or avoid mentioning the crowd audio? If so, what happens when the world feed, or a foreign broadcaster, shows something else entirely? What happens when 40,000 phones in the stadium upload their own version in real time?
The risk is not just that viewers will see through it. It is that attempts to manage the narrative will make American broadcasters look less credible, not more. Because the audience now assumes there is always another angle. Every time a broadcaster makes that trade – credibility for insulation – it is a trade audiences eventually notice.
There is also a deeper structural pressure behind decisions like this. The Trump era has been defined in part by sustained hostility toward media institutions. Broadcasters do not operate in a vacuum; they operate inside regulatory environments, political climates and corporate risk calculations. When presidents and their allies openly threaten or target networks, it is naive to pretend that has no downstream effect on editorial choices – especially in high-stakes live broadcasts tied to billion-dollar rights deals.
But there is a difference between contextual pressure and visible reality distortion. When global audiences can compare feeds in real time, the latter begins to resemble something else entirely: not editorial judgment, but narrative management. Which is why comparisons to Soviet-style state-controlled broadcasting models – once breathless rhetorical exaggerations – are starting to feel less hyperbolic.
The irony is that the Olympics themselves are built around the idea that sport can exist alongside political tension without pretending it does not exist. The International Olympic Committee’s own language – athletes should not be punished for governments’ actions – implicitly acknowledges that governments are part of the Olympic theater whether organizers like it or not.
Friday night illustrated that perfectly. American athletes were cheered, their enormous contingent given one of the most full-throated receptions of the night. The political emissaries were not universally welcomed. Both things can be true at once. Crowd dissent is not a failure of the Olympic ideal. In open societies, it is part of how public sentiment is expressed. Attempting to erase one side of that equation risks flattening reality into something audiences no longer trust. And if Milan was a warning shot, Los Angeles is the main event.
Since Donald Trump’s first term, American political coverage around sport has fixated on the micro-moments: Was the president booed or cheered? Did the broadcast show it? Did he attend or skip events likely to produce hostile crowds? The discourse has often felt like a Rorschach test, filtered through partisan interpretation and selective clips.
The LA Olympics will be something else entirely. There is no hiding from an opening ceremony for Trump. No ducking a stadium when the Olympic Charter requires the host country’s head of state to officially declare the Games open. No controlling how 200 international broadcasters carry the moment.
If Trump is still in the White House on 14 July 2028, one month after his 82nd birthday and in the thick of another heated US presidential campaign, he will stand in front of a global television audience as a key part of the opening ceremony. He will do so in California, in a political environment far less friendly than many domestic sporting venues he has appeared in over the past decade. And he will do it in a city synonymous with the political opposition, potentially in the back yard of the Democratic presidential candidate.
There will be some cheers. There will almost certainly be boos. There will be everything in between. And there will be no way to make them disappear. The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden. In an era when trust in institutions is already fragile, that is a dangerous place to operate from.
The Olympics have always been political, whether through boycotts, protests, symbolic gestures or crowd reactions. What has changed is not the politics. It is the impossibility of containing the optics.
Milan may ultimately be remembered as a small moment – a few seconds of crowd noise during a long ceremony. But it also felt like a preview of the next phase of global sport broadcasting: one where narrative control is shared, contested and instantly verifiable. The world is watching. And this time, it is also recording."
Sunday, February 08, 2026
US companies accused of ‘AI washing’ in citing artificial intelligence for job losses | US news | The Guardian
US companies accused of ‘AI washing’ in citing artificial intelligence for job losses
"While AI is having an impact on the workplace, experts suggest tariffs, overhiring during the pandemic and simply maximising profits may be bigger factors
Over the last year, US corporate leaders have often explained layoffs by saying the positions were no longer needed because artificial intelligence had made their companies more efficient, replacing humans with computers.
But some economists and technology analysts have expressed skepticism about such justifications and instead think that such workforce cuts are driven by factors like the impact of tariffs, overhiring during the Covid-19 pandemic and perhaps simple maximising of profits.
In short, the CEOs are allegedly engaged in “AI-washing”.
“You can say, ‘We are integrating the newest technology into our business processes, so we are very much a technological frontrunner, and we have to let go of these people,’” said Fabian Stephany, a departmental research lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute.
In 2025, AI was cited as a reason for more than 54,000 layoffs, according to a December report from the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
In January, Amazon alone laid off 16,000 workers after making 14,000 reductions in October.
Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of people experience and technology at Amazon, explained in an October memo that they were trimming staff because “AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.
“We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly,” Galetti added.
The Hewlett-Packard CEO, Enrique Lores, also said in a November earnings call that the company would use AI to “improve customer satisfaction and boost productivity”, which means the company could cut 6,000 people in the “next years”.
In April, Luis von Ahn, CEO of the language-learning app company Duolingo, announced that the venture would “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle”.
But the reason for such layoffs is often actually financial, according to a January reportfrom the market research firm Forrester. The company projects that only 6% of US jobs will be automated by 2030.
Companies could use AI to replace people working in call centers and technical writing, but they don’t yet have apps that can replace most occupations and probably won’t soon, said JP Gownder, a Forrester vice-president and principal analyst.
“A lot of companies are making a big mistake because their CEO, who isn’t very deep into the weeds of AI, is saying, ‘Well, let’s go ahead and lay off 20 to 30% of our employees and we will backfill them with AI,’” Gownder said. “If you do not have a mature, deployed-AI application ready to do the job … it could take you 18 to 24 months to replace that person with AI – if it even works.”
But there are benefits to attributing layoffs to AI even if that is not the case.
For example, the Challenger report stated that tariffs were cited as the reasons for fewer than 8,000 layoffs, a fraction of the number attributed to AI.
“Most economists would tell you that that was implausible,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale University. “ChatGPT was only released three years ago … It is not the case that a new technology develops and the workforce adjusts immediately. That is just not how it works.”
After a news report stated that Amazon planned to display how much Donald Trump’s tariffs increased product pricing, the White House described it as a “hostile and political act”.
An Amazon spokesperson then said, “This was never approved and is not going to happen.”
“You have seen a real hesitance among some parts of corporate America to say anything negative about the economic impacts of the Trump administration because they feel that there will be consequences,” Gimbel said. “By saying that the layoffs are due to new efficiencies created by AI, you avoid that potential pushback.”
CEOs could also be blaming layoffs on AI advancements when they actually just overhired during the pandemic, Gownder said.
“That was driven by low interest rates. That was driven by talent wars. That was driven by some dynamics that are not in place any more,” he said.
Still, there are instances where CEOs linked layoffs to AI where that is more likely to be the legitimate reason, the economists said.
For example, Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud-based software company Salesforce, said during an interview on the podcast The Logan Bartlett Show that he reduced his customer staff from 9,000 to 5,000 because he now uses AI agents.
“I need less heads,” he said.
Stephany said that was plausible.
“The work that has been described – particularly online and customer support – is, in terms of tasks and required skills, relatively close to what current AI systems can perform,” Stephany said.
But that does not mean the public should just accept Benioff’s claim, the AI researchers said.
“I think CEO statements are possibly the worst way to figure out how technological change is affecting the labor market,” Gimbel said. “That is not to say that CEOs are lying … It’s to say that there’s incentive effects in what gets covered.”
Not long after Amazon’s vice-president linked the October layoffs to AI, the CEO, Andy Jassy, backpedaled.
He said they were “not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven, not right now. It really is culture.”
And months after the Duolingo CEO stated that the company would be “AI first” and only add to its headcount “if a team cannot automate more of their work”, he told the New York Times that the company had never laid off full-time employees and did not plan to.
“From the beginning, we’ve had contractors that we use for temporary tasks, and our contractor force has gone up and down depending on needs,” he said.
An employee laid off by Amazon in October described herself as a “heavy user of AI”.
“There were certain tools that I built specifically for my team’s use, as well as some of our customer teams to use,” said the former principal program manager, whose last day at Amazon was in January and asked not to be identified to protect her privacy because she has not yet received severance pay.
She does not think that AI is why she was terminated but instead “maybe aided the ability to have a more junior person do some of the work”.
After an employee told her, “Bring me up to speed on the stuff you were working on. We’re going to assign this to one of these new people,” it became clear “that this work wasn’t going to stop but that they were going to get someone who was paid far less to do that work”, she said.
She added: “I was laid off to save the cost of human labor.”
US companies accused of ‘AI washing’ in citing artificial intelligence for job losses | US news | The Guardian
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