Sunday, November 30, 2025
In Announcing Pardon of Drug Trafficker While Threatening Venezuela, Trump Displays Contradictions
In Announcing Pardon of Drug Trafficker While Threatening Venezuela, Trump Displays Contradictions
President Trump’s recent actions highlight contradictions in his anti-drug trafficking strategy. While he announced a pardon for former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted of drug trafficking, he also escalated military efforts against drug cartels, particularly in Venezuela. This decision has drawn criticism, as it undermines the administration’s claims of prioritizing the fight against drug trafficking.
President Trump’s statements on social media less than 24 hours apart showed the dissonance in his campaign against drug trafficking.
President Trump and his top aides have said that drug cartels present one of the most pressing dangers to the United States, and have promised to eradicate them from the Western Hemisphere.
As part of that effort, Mr. Trump signaled on Saturday that he was ratcheting up his campaign against drug cartels, saying in a social media post that airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges in what was seen as a major victory for authorities in a case against a former head of state. That pardon has not yet been officially granted.
The two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.
Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, called the pardon “unconscionable” and said that Mr. Trump’s actions were more evidence of a “bogus narrative” around his strategy to counter illicit drugs.
“It completely undercuts the administration’s claim that they really care about narco-trafficking, and that raises the question of what is really going on with the Venezuela operation,” he said.
The Trump administration has struggled to provide a clear strategic rationale for why it has amassed such a large military presence in the Caribbean. The president has most often pointed to counternarcotics operations, but the size of the U.S. forces in the region suggests bigger ambitions. In private, the president has shown an interest in Venezuela’s oil reserves, while he and his aides also have said they want to oust Mr. Maduro.
In a statement, Mr. Trump said he had issued the pardon to Mr. Hernández because “many friends” had asked him to do so, adding, “They gave him 45 years because he was the president of the country — you could do this to any president on any country.” (After Mr. Trump left office, he was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, related to the reimbursement of hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels to cover up a sex scandal around the 2016 presidential election.)
“By securing the border and striking designated narco-terrorists smuggling drugs to kill Americans, the president has undoubtedly done more than anyone to take on the scourge of illicit drug deaths,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Over the last several weeks, senior officials have made clear that the administration is focused on taking on drug cartels in the Caribbean and South America.
“We are going to make sure that the American people are safe and protected from transnational organized crime,” Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, told reporters earlier this month. “Venezuela is run by a narcoterrorist ring that traffics drugs, weapons, human traffics, as well, into the United States.”
And just over two hours after Mr. Trump’s announcement of a pardon for Mr. Hernández, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
Over the last several months, the United States has been building up its military presence in the Caribbean, part of a campaign that the administration has said is primarily about stopping the flow of drugs in the region. The U.S. military has launched nearly two dozen strikes since early September on boats that it claimed were carrying drugs to the United States, killing more than 80 people. But the administration has yet to detail evidence for those claims.
“Hernández was convicted of conspiring to traffic 400 tons of cocaine in to the United States, and he gets a pardon,” said Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for the National Security Council in the Obama administration who now co-hosts the liberal podcast “Pod Save America.” “Meanwhile, these unknown individuals who may or may not be fisherman or drug traffickers — we don’t really know — are getting murdered in the open seas. The policy is nonsensical and blatantly illegal.”
Mr. Trump has also put intense pressure on Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, accusing him of being the boss of a drug organization called Cartel de los Soles, even though experts in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues say it is not an actual organization. Mr. Trump has also authorized covert C.I.A. action in Venezuela, and many American officials say privately that their goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.
The president’s decision to pardon Mr. Hernández shocked officials in Honduras and in the United States. Prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández, 57, would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison, and his conviction came as part of a sweeping drug case in which several former traffickers took the stand as government witnesses.
Mr. Hernández’s family has attempted to portray his conviction as political persecution, seeking to win over Mr. Trump. But much of the investigation occurred during Mr. Trump’s first term, and one of the lead investigators in the case was Emil Bove III, then a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and later one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers. Mr. Trump installed Mr. Bove as a top official at the Justice Department in his second term before nominating him to serve as an appeals court judge.
Ricardo Zuniga, a former principal deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said it was “quite evident” that Mr. Hernández was involved in criminal activity across multiple U.S. administrations.
“I would be surprised if you didn’t find multiple people in the pro-Trump space, including the law enforcement community, who are not shocked by this,” he said.
Annie Correal contributed reporting.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.“
Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends
Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends
“David Sacks, the Trump administration’s AI and crypto czar, has been accused of using his position to benefit his Silicon Valley friends and investments. Sacks, who maintains hundreds of tech investments, has pushed for policies that favor companies like Nvidia, potentially benefiting his own financial interests. Critics argue that Sacks’s dual role as a government official and investor creates significant ethical conflicts.
David Sacks, the Trump administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, has helped formulate policies that aid his Silicon Valley friends and many of his own tech investments.
In July, David Sacks, one of the Trump administration’s top technology officials, beamed as he strode onstage at a neoclassical auditorium just blocks from the White House. He had convened top government officials and Silicon Valley executives for a forum on the booming business of artificial intelligence.
The guest of honor was President Trump, who unveiled an “A.I. Action Plan” that was drafted in part by Mr. Sacks, a longtime venture capitalist. In a nearly hourlong speech, Mr. Trump declared that A.I. was “one of the most important technological revolutions in the history of the world.” Then he picked up his pen and signed executive orders to fast-track the industry.
Almost everyone in the high-powered audience — which included the chief executives of the chipmakers Nvidia and AMD, as well as Mr. Sacks’s tech friends, colleagues and business partners — were poised to profit from Mr. Trump’s directives.
Among the winners was Mr. Sacks himself.
Since January, Mr. Sacks, 53, has occupied one of the most advantageous moonlighting roles in the federal government, influencing policy for Silicon Valley in Washington while simultaneously working in Silicon Valley as an investor. Among his actions as the White House’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar:
Mr. Sacks has offered astonishing White House access to his tech industry compatriots and pushed to eliminate government obstacles facing A.I. companies. That has set up giants like Nvidia to reap an estimate of as much as $200 billion in new sales.
Mr. Sacks has recommended A.I. policies that have sometimes run counter to national security recommendations, alarming some of his White House colleagues and raising questions about his priorities.
Mr. Sacks has positioned himself to personally benefit. He has 708 tech investments, including at least 449 stakes in companies with ties to artificial intelligence that could be aided directly or indirectly by his policies, according to a New York Times analysis of his financial disclosures.
His public filings designate 438 of his tech investments as software or hardware companies, even though the firms promote themselves as A.I. enterprises, offer A.I. services or have A.I. in their names, The Times found.
Mr. Sacks has raised the profile of his weekly podcast, “All-In,” through his government role, and expanded its business.
No event better illustrates Mr. Sacks’s ethical complexities and how his intertwined interests have come together than the July A.I. summit. Mr. Sacks initially planned for the forum to be hosted by “All-In,” which he leads with other tech investors. “All-In” asked potential sponsors to each pay it $1 million for access to a private reception and other events at the summit “bringing together President Donald Trump and leading A.I. innovators,” according to a proposal viewed by The Times.
The plan so worried some officials that Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, intervened to prevent “All-In" from serving as the sole host of the forum, two people with knowledge of the episode said.
Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and a critic of Silicon Valley billionaires, said Mr. Sacks was a quintessential example of ethical conflicts in an administration where “the tech bros are out of control.”
“They are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy,” he said.
Mr. Sacks has been allowed to serve in government while working in private industry because he is a “special government employee,” a title the White House typically confers on experts who temporarily advise the government. He is not paid for his work for the administration.
In March, Mr. Sacks received two White House ethics waivers, which said he was selling or had sold most of his crypto and A.I. assets. His remaining investments, the waivers said, were “not so substantial” as to influence his government service.
But Mr. Sacks stands out as a special government employee because of his hundreds of investments in tech companies, which can benefit from policies that he influences. His public ethics filings, which are based on self-reported information, do not disclose the value of those remaining stakes in crypto and A.I.-related companies. They also omit when he sold assets he said he would divest, making it difficult to determine whether his government service has netted him profits.
A White House spokeswoman, Liz Huston, said Mr. Sacks had addressed potential conflicts. His insights were “an invaluable asset for President Trump’s agenda of cementing American technology dominance,” she said.
Jessica Hoffman, a spokeswoman for Mr. Sacks, said that “this conflict of interest narrative is false.” Mr. Sacks has complied with special government employee rules and the Office of Government Ethics determined that he should sell investments in certain types of A.I. companies but not others, she said. His government role has cost him, not benefited him, she added.
At a White House dinner for tech executives in September, Mr. Sacks said he was grateful to work in both technology and government. It was “a great honor to have a foot in each one of these worlds,” he said.
‘David’s House’
Mr. Sacks’s road to the White House began in Silicon Valley.
He arrived in the tech heartland in 1990 as an undergraduate at Stanford University, where he met fellow students including Peter Thiel. Mr. Sacks later joined Mr. Thiel at a start-up that became the electronic payments firm PayPal, alongside Elon Musk.
After eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, the men invested in one another. Mr. Sacks helped fund Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, as well as Palantir, the data analysis firm co-founded by Mr. Thiel. In turn, Mr. Thiel backed Yammer, Mr. Sacks’s business communications start-up that was sold to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion.
In 2017, Mr. Sacks began Craft Ventures, a firm that has invested in hundreds of start-ups, including some owned by his friends. He also started the “All-In” podcast three years later with friends and fellow investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg.
Mr. Sacks became a major player in Republican politics in 2022, when he donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting the Senate run of JD Vance, a former tech investor who worked for Mr. Thiel.
Last year, Mr. Sacks hosted a $12 million fund-raiser for Mr. Trump at his San Francisco mansion. The dinner made an impression on the presidential candidate.
“I love David’s house,” Mr. Trump said on “All-In” two weeks later. “What a house.”
After the election, Mr. Trump’s team asked Mr. Sacks to join the administration. He said he would, as long as he could continue working at Craft — and got his wish.
“It’s exactly what I requested,” Mr. Sacks said of his dual position in December.
Allying With Nvidia
Mr. Sacks opened the door of the White House to Silicon Valley leaders. Among the most prominent visitors was Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.
Mr. Sacks and Mr. Huang, who had not met before Mr. Sacks joined the administration, forged a tight bond this spring, said three people familiar with the men, who were not authorized to discuss their interactions.
Both stood to benefit. Mr. Huang, 62, wanted government clearance to sell Nvidia’s highly coveted A.I. chips around the world, despite security concernsthat the components could bolster China’s economy and military. Mr. Huang argued that restricting exports of Nvidia’s chips would push Chinese companies to develop more powerful alternatives. And spreading Nvidia’s technology would expand the A.I. industry, aiding the A.I. investments owned by Mr. Sacks and his friends.
In White House meetings, Mr. Sacks echoed Mr. Huang’s ideas that the best way to beat China would be to flood the world with American technology. Mr. Sacks worked to eliminate Biden-era restrictions on Nvidia and other American chip companies’ sales to foreign countries. He also opposed rules that would have made it difficult for foreign companies to buy U.S. chips for international data centers, five people with knowledge of the White House discussions said.
Free of those restrictions, Mr. Sacks flew to the Middle East in May and struck a deal to send 500,000 American A.I. chips — mostly from Nvidia — to the United Arab Emirates. The large number alarmed some White House officials, who feared that China, an ally of the Emirates, would gain access to the technology, these people said.
But the deal was a win for Nvidia. Analysts estimated that it could make as much as $200 billion from the chip sales.
Ms. Hoffman said Mr. Sacks developed his thinking by talking to many people, not just Mr. Huang, and “wants the entire American tech stack to win.” None of his holdings benefited from the Emirates deal, she said.
Mylene Mangalindan, an Nvidia spokeswoman, said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was the company’s primary contact for A.I. chip sales abroad.
Mr. Sacks trumpeted the Emirati deal on “All-In” in May. “I would define winning as the whole world consolidates around the American A.I.” companies, he said.
There was one last obstacle to that goal: removing a U.S. ban on direct chip sales to China.
In the White House, Mr. Sacks promoted the idea that the ban inadvertently helped China by diverting chip sales to Huawei, a Chinese rival to Nvidia, four people familiar with the discussions said.
In July, Mr. Sacks and Mr. Huang took their argument to an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Trump. Before the meeting ended, Mr. Trump cleared Nvidia to sell its chips to China.
The Sacks Portfolio
The White House has praised Mr. Sacks, saying he minimized his financial conflicts of interest.
The ethics waivers that Mr. Sacks received said he and Craft Ventures had sold more than $200 million in crypto positions, including investments in Bitcoin, and were divesting stakes in A.I.-related companies including Meta, Amazon and xAI.
Mr. Sacks had started or completed sales of “over 99 percent” of his “holdings in companies that could potentially raise a conflict of interest concern,” the White House said.
Ms. Huston, the White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Sacks was “recused from participating in any matters that could affect his financial interests until he was able to divest of conflicting interests or until he received a waiver.”
But Mr. Sacks’s waivers provide an incomplete picture of his wealth and do not say when he sold his holdings in Meta, Amazon and other companies.
What is clear is that Mr. Sacks, directly or through Craft, has retained 20 crypto and 449 A.I.-related investments, according to The Times analysis.
Of the A.I.-related investments, 11 were designated in one waiver as “A.I. Interests.” The other 438 were classified as software or hardware makers, even though they promote A.I. offerings or services on their websites. In one example, the waiver categorized Palantir as “software as a service,” while the company’s website says it provides “A.I.-Powered Automation for Every Decision.” Forty-one of the companies have A.I. in their names, such as Resemble.AI and CrewAI.
In one of the waivers, the White House said many of the software companies “do not currently use A.I.-related applications in their core business in any material way,” but added that “many of them are likely to at some point in the future.”
Policies that Mr. Sacks supported at the White House have laid the groundwork for his investments to flourish.
The A.I. Action Plan promoted domestic production of autonomous drones and other A.I. inventions for the Pentagon. Mr. Sacks has stakes in defense tech start-ups such as Anduril, Firestorm Labs and Swarm Aero that make drones and other products, according to his filings. In September, Anduril announced a $159 million contract with the U.S. Army to build a new type of night vision goggles with A.I.
Shannon Prior, an Anduril spokeswoman, said the company had a relationship with the Army before the A.I. Action Plan and that it received the contract because its founder, Palmer Luckey, is “the world’s best virtual reality headset designer.” Ms. Hoffman said it was an “obvious idea” to include the military use of A.I. in the policy plan.
This spring, Mr. Sacks also backed a bill called the GENIUS Act to regulate stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a constant price of $1. Mr. Sacks promoted the legislation on CNBC and worked to advance it through Congress.
After the bill passed in July, Mr. Sacks called it “historic” and “momentous” on “All-In.” It is poised to significantly expand the stablecoin business.
One of Craft’s crypto investments is BitGo, a company that works with issuers of stablecoins. BitGo celebrated the GENIUS Act on its website and promptly capitalized, declaring that its service “fit perfectly” with the new guidelines. “The wait is over,” the site said.
In September, BitGo filed for an initial public offering. Craft owns 7.8 percent of the company, according to financial filings, which would be worth more than $130 million at BitGo’s 2023 valuation.
BitGo declined to comment. Ms. Hoffman said the GENIUS Act’s passage “contained no specific benefit for BitGo.”
Since Mr. Sacks joined the White House, A.I. companies have continued to announce new investments from Craft. In July, Vultron, a start-up that develops A.I. software for government contractors, celebrated $22 million in new financing and heralded the contribution of “Craft Ventures, co-founded by White House A.I. adviser David Sacks.”
The funding was secured before Mr. Sacks joined the administration, said Mac Liu, Vultron’s chief executive. “We mentioned David in the announcement because he’s a big name in A.I.,” he said.
Mr. Sacks remains on the board of Glue, a start-up that he helped found that offers an A.I.-assisted chat platform. In October, Glue announced $20 million in new funding, including from Craft.
Mr. Sacks had left corporate boards before joining the Trump administration, but stayed on Glue’s because “it was allowed,” Ms. Hoffman said. The funding was completed last year, she said. Glue did not respond to a request for comment.
Going ‘All-In’
In an “All-In” episode in March, two of the podcasts’ hosts, Mr. Friedberg and Mr. Palihapitiya, stood outside the East Wing.
They had been “running around” the White House, Mr. Palihapitiya said, as the show spliced in photos of them walking through wainscoted rooms and joining Mr. Sacks in the portico dividing the East and West Wings.
The podcasters then interviewed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about economic policy. Days later, they returned with a nearly two-hour interview with Mr. Lutnick. Two months after that, they interviewed the secretaries of agriculture and the interior. In September, “All-In” posted a video of a private Oval Office tour with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Sacks’s government work has boosted the profile of the podcast, which is downloaded 6 million times a month. Its annual conference in Los Angeles generated roughly $21 million in ticket sales this year, up from $15 million last year, based on its $7,500 ticket price and public attendance estimates. In June, the podcast introduced a $1,200 “All-In”-branded tequila.
Mr. Sacks has forgone A.I. and crypto-related revenues, such as from sponsorships, but can share in sales from tequila and event tickets, Ms. Hoffman said. Jon Haile, the podcast’s chief executive, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Sacks’s personal business and policy work came together at the July A.I. event in Washington, which he tapped “All-In” to host.
But Ms. Wiles, the White House chief of staff, did not want the administration to appear to endorse the “All-In” brand, two people with knowledge of the summit said. They said she called for the addition of a co-host. Mr. Sacks went to the organizers of the Hill and Valley Forum, an annual conference for tech and government officials, Ms. Hoffman said.
Visa and the New York Stock Exchange sponsored the A.I. summit. The organizers declined to disclose what the companies paid. Ms. Hoffman said “All-In” lost money hosting the event, and that “no V.I.P. reception occurred.” The New York Stock Exchange declined to comment, and Visa did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Sacks opened the event by describing his White House experience as “incredible” and hailing the administration’s work on A.I. and crypto. Then he handed off hosting duties to his “All-In” partners, who interviewed Mr. Huang of Nvidia and White House officials onstage.
In the keynote speech, Mr. Trump described Mr. Sacks as “great” before signing executive orders to speed the building of data centers and exports of A.I systems.
Then he handed Mr. Sacks the presidential pen.
David McCabe contributed reporting. Teresa Mondría Terol and Kitty Bennettcontributed research.
Cecilia Kang reports on technology and regulatory policy for The Times from Washington. She has written about technology for over two decades.
Tripp Mickle reports on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about trends across the tech industry like layoffs and artificial intelligence.
Ryan Mac covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry.
David Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry from New York. He can be reached at davidyb@nytimes.com.
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.“
Saturday, November 29, 2025
Friday, November 28, 2025
Opinion | Mamdani, His Mother and a Movie of Prescient Grace - The New York Times
Mamdani, His Mother and a Movie of Prescient Grace
By Lisa Schwarzbaum
"Ms. Schwarzbaum is a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly.
Any New Yorker who was alive on Sept. 11, 2001, can tell you where she was that September morning. This New Yorker was out of town, at the Toronto International Film Festival, at an early morning press screening of “Monsoon Wedding.” The movie, a vibrant hubbub of a romantic comedy set in Delhi, had already won the top prize at the Venice International Film Festival, and the film’s director, Mira Nair, had won widespread praise for her previous films “Salaam Bombay!” and “Mississippi Masala.”
Ms. Nair is now perhaps at least as well known for being the mother of Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor-elect. Mr. Mamdani — who was 9 years old in 2001 — ran an optimistic campaign that energized a large swath of voters, and also triumphed over an ugly uprising of bigotry and Islamophobia, including unwarranted evocations of 9/11 as a presumed smear against his credibility, only because he is Muslim.
I watched “Monsoon Wedding” again recently. The film chronicles all the things that can go wrong — before they go right — during preparations for a lavish celebration of a traditional Indian arranged marriage. Money affects family dynamics. Secrets come to light. Everybody dances! I was also newly attuned to Ms. Nair’s presentation of gradations of wealth within the extended family, and its depictions of the imperious relationships between the well-to-do and those who work for them. The film’s technique of inserting unscripted shots of throbbing Delhi street life between structured dramatic scenes set in manicured surroundings took on new aspect as I thought of the mayor-elect, whose campaign emphasized his own ease (especially in contrast to his opponents) in the welter of New York City streets. As a movie lover and a New Yorker, I hope Mr. Mamdani can retain that kind of confidence in the midst of tumult, which his mother demonstrated so gracefully in her film, moving her large cast of characters from chaos to unity.
“Monsoon Wedding” is grounded in a culture that, when the film was released in 2001, was likely unfamiliar to many in its audience — it was certainly unfamiliar to many of us who’d gathered in that Canadian movie theater on that September morning. Yet the bonds of family that Ms. Nair depicts are so accessible and inviting that no cross-cultural translation was necessary. And I can recall, 24 years later, how, even at that theater in Toronto, those assembled knew joy when we saw it. We walked out into the world blinking with contentment.
That’s when we encountered people screaming, riveted to TV screens in the lobby of a Toronto multiplex, watching as the twin towers fell, over and over and over, in footage replayed in a loop of horror.
I couldn’t absorb the trauma of those who were caught up in that tragedy at close range. I do know that the agony of those of us who’d traveled to Toronto, so close yet so far from our families, our friends and our beloved, blasted city, was its own trauma. We were New Yorkers first, filmmakers and actors and journalists and critics and publicists a distant second. The festival machinery juddered to a halt. We desperately wanted to get back home. It was temporarily impossible to do so. The airports were closed. The shock reverberated through the privileged confines of the festival hallways, through the hearts of our Canadian colleagues helpless to comfort us, and out through the city streets of a country near, but not our own.
Until this year, when I thought about “Monsoon Wedding,” it was usually as a marker for where-were-you-when. Yet watching the ascent this year of that 9-year-old boy, and the ugliness of the attacks against him as an adult, the loveliness of that little movie, directed by the mayor-elect’s Indian-born mother, has re-emerged for me from the rubble of my memory with a new and clarifying resonance.
I don’t mean to get cosmic about this singular alignment of circumstances. But I do mean to admire how everything resilient and unfathomably hopeful about this city is contained in the crazy math of this coincidence, a calculus that ties together making war and making art, fearing and hoping, mourning and celebration, generation after generation.
In hindsight, of course it had to be a wedding movie — the genre that’s always proved to be a necessary and universal balm. For so many years, post 9/11, our American psyche has been warped by a fear and distrust of other cultures, but the wedding movie, in both rom-com and dramatic form, is an antidote to those isolationist tendencies. That genre is one of the few where global audiences have always agreed to get along, whether through broad farce — I’m thinking of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Crazy Rich Asians” — or gentle humor, as in “The Wedding Banquet,” Ang Lee’s 1993 film about a gay Taiwanese-born man hiding his sexual identity from his traditional parents. Some of the very best dramas about weddings (and all that comes before and after) have made complicated cultures understandable to worldwide audiences, whether it’s the marital stresses on a middle-class Iranian couple in Asghar Farhadi’s 2011 “A Separation” or the strictures of Orthodox life in Israel in the internationally popular TV series “Shtisel.”
On 9/11, the day New York (and the world) changed forever, a roomful of us were watching an Indian wedding movie across the border from America, cocooned in a shared humanity and optimism that was about to be tested for decades to come. The fact that, nearly a quarter-century later, we might enjoy another moment of shared humanity and optimism, generated by the election of the son of the mother who made that film, is like — well, it hardly seems plausible. It’s like something right out of a movie."
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Amazon Workers Issue Warning About Company’s ‘All-Costs-Justified’ Approach to AI Development
Amazon Workers Issue Warning About Company’s ‘All-Costs-Justified’ Approach to AI Development
Over 1,000 Amazon employees signed an open letter expressing concerns about the company’s aggressive AI development, citing potential harm to democracy, jobs, and the environment. The letter demands Amazon abandon carbon fuel sources for data centers, prohibit AI use for surveillance and deportation, and stop forcing employee use of AI. The employees, supported by over 2,400 individuals from other organizations, emphasize the need for a more thoughtful approach to AI deployment.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice says that over 1,000 workers have signed a petition raising “serious concerns” about the company’s “aggressive rollout” of artificial intelligence tools.
Photograph: David Ryder; Getty Images
Over 1,000 Amazon employees have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the company’s allegedly “all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development” could cause “staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” an internal advocacy group announced on Wednesday.
Four members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tell WIRED that they began asking workers to sign the letter last month. After reaching their initial goal, the group published on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon employees who signed and disclosed that more than 2,400 supporters from other organizations, including Google and Apple, have also joined in.
Backers inside Amazon include high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, marketing managers, and warehouse staff spanning many divisions of the company. A senior engineering manager with over 20 years at Amazon says they signed because they believe a manufactured “race” to build the best AI has empowered executives to trample workers and the environment.
“The current generation of AI has become almost like a drug that companies like Amazon obsess over, use as a cover to lay people off, and use the savings to pay for data centers for AI products no one is paying for,” says the employee, who like others in this story, asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from their bosses.
Amazon, along with other big tech companies, is in the midst of investing billions of dollars to construct new data centers to train and run generative AI systems. This includes tools helping workers write code and consumer-facing services such as Amazon’s shopping chatbot, Rufus. It’s easy to see why Amazon is pursuing AI. Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that Rufus was on track to increase Amazon’s sales by $10 billion annually. It “is continuing to get better and better,” he said.
AI systems demand significant power, which has forced utility companies to turn to coal plants and other carbon-emitting sources of energy to support the data center boom. The open letter demands that Amazon abandon carbon fuel sources at its data centers, bar its AI technologies from being used to carry out surveillance and mass deportation, and stop forcing employees to use AI in their work. “We, the undersigned Amazon employees, have serious concerns about this aggressive rollout during the global rise of authoritarianism and our most important years to reverse the climate crisis,” the letter states.
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser says that the company remains committed to its goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. “We recognize that progress will not always be linear, but we remain focused on serving our customers better, faster, and with fewer emissions,” he says, repeating earlier company statements. Glasser didn’t address employee concerns about internal AI tools or external uses of the technology.
The letter represents a rare instance of tech employee activism during a year rocked by President Donald Trump’s return to power. His administration has rolled back labor protections, climate policies, and AI regulations. The measures have left some workers feeling uneasy about speaking out about what they perceive as unethical conduct by their employers. Many are also concerned about job security as automation threatens entry-level software engineering and marketing roles.
A number of organizations around the world have tried to advocate for a slowdown in AI development. In 2023, hundreds of prominent scientists petitioned the biggest AI companies to pause work on the technology for six months and evaluate potentially catastrophic harms stemming from it. The campaigns have generated scant success, and companies continue to rapidly release new, increasingly powerful AI models.
But despite the challenging political environment, members of the climate justice group at Amazon say they felt they had to try to combat potential harms from AI. Their strategy, in part, is to focus less on longer-term worries about AI that is more capable than humans, in favor of putting more emphasis on consequences they argue must be confronted now. Members say they are not against AI—in fact, they are optimistic about the technology, but want companies to take a more thoughtful approach to how they deploy it.
“It’s not just about what will happen if they succeed in developing superintelligence,” says a decade-long veteran in Amazon’s entertainment business. “What we’re trying to say is, look, the costs we’re paying now aren’t worth it. We are in the few remaining years to avoid catastrophic warming.”
Rallying support for the open letter was more difficult than in previous years, workers say, because Amazon has increasingly restricted employees' ability to solicit people to sign petitions. The majority of signers for the new letter came from reaching out to colleagues outside of work, the organizers tell WIRED.
Orin Starn, an anthropologist at Duke University who spent two years undercover as an Amazon warehouse worker, says the moment is ripe for taking on the giant. “Many people have tired of brazen billionaire excess and a company with nothing more than cosmetic PR concern about climate change, AI, immigrant rights, and the lives of its own workers,” he says.
Slop Factory
Two of the Amazon employees say executives are minimizing problems with the company’s internal AI tools and glossing over how dissatisfied workers are with them.
Some engineers are under pressure to use AI to double their productivity or else risk losing their jobs, according to a software development engineer in Amazon’s cloud computing division. But the engineer says that Amazon’s tools for writing code and technical documentation aren’t good enough to reach such ambitious targets. Another employee calls the AI outputs “slop.”
The open letter calls for Amazon to establish “ethical AI working groups” involving rank-and-file workers who would have a voice in how emerging technologies are used in their job duties. They also want a say in how AI might be used to automate aspects of their roles. Last month, a surge of workers began signing the letter after Amazon announced it would be cutting about 14,000 jobs to better meet the demands of the AI era. Amazon employed nearly 1.58 million people as of September, down from a peak of over 1.6 million at the end of 2021.
The climate justice group intentionally targeted reaching their signature milestone ahead of the Black Friday shopping bonanza, aiming to remind the public about the cost of the technology powering one of the world’s biggest online shopping platforms. The group believes it can have an impact because labor unions, including in nursing, government, and education, have successfully fought to have a say over how AI is used in their fields.
Climate Concerns
The Amazon employee group, which formed in 2018, claims credit for influencing some of the company’s environmental pledges through a series of walkouts, shareholder proposals, and petitions, including one in 2019 that drew over 8,700 employee signatures.
Glasser, the Amazon spokesperson, says climate goals and projects were in the works long before the advocacy group emerged. What no one disputes, however, is the scale of the challenges ahead. The activists note that Amazon’s emissions have grown about 35 percent since 2019, and they want a new detailed plan established to reach the company’s goal of net-zero by 2040.
The activists say what they have received from Amazon recently is uninspiring. One of the employees says that several weeks ago, at a companywide meeting, an executive stated that demand for data centers would grow 10-fold by 2027. The executive went on to tout a new strategy for cutting water usage at the facilities by 9 percent. “That’s such a drop in the bucket,” the worker says. “I would love to talk about the 10 times more energy part and where we are going to get that.”
Glasser, the Amazon spokesperson, says, “Amazon is already committed to powering our operations even more sustainably and investing in carbon-free energy.”