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Amazon employees demand stoppage of facial recognition contract with law enforcement
Amazon workers have penned a letter to Jeff Bezos calling on the CEO to immediately cancel the access of law enforcement agencies to its Rekognition facial recognition system. The employees’ letter comes on the heels of several Amazon shareholders who have also asked the e-commerce giant to stop selling Rekognition to the police.
As could be seen in the letter to the CEO, Amazon’s employees stated that they do not agree to have their work used for purposes that could target marginalized groups. The letter also cited the United States government’s practice of separating children away from their parents at the border as a key reason why Amazon should cancel its contract with law enforcement agencies. Amazon workers further called for the removal of Palantir, a data-mining company, from the client list of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Palantir, a company founded by Peter Thiel, currently has a contract with ICE and is actively involved in the agency’s deportation and detention programs.
Rekognition is, at its core, an API for deep learning-based analysis to detect, track, and analyze people and objects in videos. In Amazon’s advertisement for the service on YouTube, the company could be seen promoting Rekognition’s facial tracking capabilities such as smart home monitoring, celebrity detection in videos, and more serious applications such as the recognition and tracking of persons of interest. An investigation conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this year determined that Amazon actively marketed Rekognition to law enforcement officials, citing the software’s advanced face tracking capabilities.
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- A demonstration of the capabilities of Amazon Rekognition. [Credit: Amazon Cloud Services/YouTube]
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- A demonstration of the capabilities of Amazon Rekognition. [Credit: Amazon Cloud Services/YouTube]
The Amazon employees’ initiative against the company’s ties to law enforcement comes on the heels of similar protests in Microsoft and Google. Earlier this year, Google was beset by a brief exodus of workers and employee protests after it was revealed that the company had aided the Pentagon in its AI-driven Project Maven initiative, which uses artificial intelligence to effectively analyze footage from military drones. While Google stated that the work it has done with the Pentagon was mundane, the company ultimately opted not to renew its Project Maven contract, while also announcing new ethics principles to govern its artificial intelligence work.
Microsoft also found itself in hot water last May after it was revealed that the company has a $19.4 million contract with the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In a letter addressed to CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft employees stated that they “refuse to be complicit” in ICE’s practice of marginalizing select ethnic groups and actively separating families. In a response to its employees’ protests, Microsoft noted that the company only provides non-surveillance services such as mail, calendar, messaging and document management to the government agency.
The Amazon workers’ full letter to Jeff Bezos could be read in full below.
Dear Jeff,
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We are troubled by the recent report from the ACLU exposing our company’s practice of selling AWS Rekognition, a powerful facial recognition technology, to police departments and government agencies. We don’t have to wait to find out how these technologies will be used. We already know that in the midst of historic militarization of police, renewed targeting of Black activists, and the growth of a federal deportation force currently engaged in human rights abuses — this will be another powerful tool for the surveillance state, and ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized. We are not alone in this view: over 40 civil rights organizations signed an open letter in opposition to the governmental use of facial recognition, while over 150,000 individuals signed another petition delivered by the ACLU.
We also know that Palantir runs on AWS. And we know that ICE relies on Palantir to power its detention and deportation programs. Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents. Since April 19, 2018 the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers. This treatment goes against U.N. Refugee Agency guidelines that say children have the right to remain united with their parents, and that asylum-seekers have a legal right to claim asylum. In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and DHS.
Technology like ours is playing an increasingly critical role across many sectors of society. What is clear to us is that our development and sales practices have yet to acknowledge the obligation that comes with this. Focusing solely on shareholder value is a race to the bottom, and one that we will not participate in.
We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights.
As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build, and a say in how it is used. We learn from history, and we understand how IBM’s systems were employed in the 1940s to help Hitler. IBM did not take responsibility then, and by the time their role was understood, it was too late. We will not let that happen again. The time to act is now.
We call on you to:
- Stop selling facial recognition services to law enforcement
- Stop providing infrastructure to Palantir and any other Amazon partners who enable ICE.
- Implement strong transparency and accountability measures, that include enumerating which law enforcement agencies and companies supporting law enforcement agencies are using Amazon services, and how.
Our company should not be in the surveillance business; we should not be in the policing business; we should not be in the business of supporting those who monitor and oppress marginalized populations.
Sincerely,
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Amazonians
Here’s Amazon’s advertisement for Rekognition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNONL4IecHE
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
