Some tech workers are pressuring the industry's top leaders to speak out against ICE after federal officers killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, less than a month after the shooting of Renee Good.

The big picture: The world's richest tech companies often wield unique influence over the White House. But in the wake of the fatal shootings in Minneapolis, the companies and their CEOs have largely chosen to stay silent.

• Silicon Valley has shifted rightward this term, as many embraced President Trump's pro-AI growth and economic policies.

State of play: More than 450 tech workers from companies including Google, Salesforce, Meta, OpenAI and Amazon have signed a letter urging CEOs to contact the White House, demand that ICE leave cities, and cancel all company contracts with ICE.

• "Tech professionals are speaking up against this brutality, and we call on all our colleagues who share our values to use their voice," states the letter organized by ICEout.tech, an initiative pushing for tech CEOs to speak out against ICE.
• "We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco."

The organizers of ICEout.tech said their call has even more urgency following the attendance of Amazon, AMD, Apple and Zoom executives at a White House screening of first lady Melania Trump's new documentary just hours after the shooting.

Axios reached out to more than a dozen top tech companies on Pretti's killing, the potential use of their technologies in protest surveillance, and executives' attendance of the documentary screening.

• Representatives from Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, OpenAI and Salesforce did not reply to a request for comment.
• A Microsoft representative told Axios the company was looking into the matter, but did not comment further.

Context: The silence stands in contrast to earlier activism on the part of tech companies and executives. Companies were vocal about President Trump's policies on immigration, race and LGBTQ+ rights during his first term.

• Tech execs during Trump's second term have instead shown up frequently to be seen alongside the president and boost his policies.

Some notable tech figures who have spoken out against ICE and Trump's immigration enforcement tactics following Pretti's death include Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean and computer scientist Paul Graham.

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AI is increasingly being used as a research collaborator for mathematicians and scientists, per a new report from OpenAI shared exclusively with Axios' Ashley Gold.

Why it matters: OpenAI argues that AI can make scientists more productive by upping the amount of research that can get done, ultimately leading to more life-saving breakthroughs.

By the numbers: Per OpenAI's report, an internal analysis of a random sample of anonymized ChatGPT conversations from January to December of last year showed:

• Average weekly message counts on "advanced hard-science topics" grew nearly 47% over the year.
• As of January of this year, nearly 1.3 million weekly users are discussing "advanced topics in hard science" with an average of 8.4 million ChatGPT messages on those topics.

Topics include graduate and research-level math, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering.

• Among the OpenAI users and messages sampled, ChatGPT was used most for advanced research in computer science, data science and AI.

What they're saying: "More researchers are using advanced reasoning systems to make progress on open problems, interpret complex data, and iterate faster in experimental work," Kevin Weil, VP of OpenAI for Science, said in the report.

• "We're still early, but the pace of adoption and the quality of
  the work suggest science is entering a new acceleration phase."

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Job listings that mention AI terms are surging, even as the overall labor market looks weak, per new data from the jobs site Indeed.

Why it matters: Everyone's braced for AI to take their jobs, but for now the new technology appears to be an actual bright spot in an otherwise grim labor market — particularly for white-collar professionals.

How it works: Indeed analyzes its job postings for mentions of AI-related keywords like "artificial intelligence," "large language models" and "ChatGPT."

• Those listings are up 134% since February 2020, when the site first began tracking. Overall job postings are only 6% above that pre-pandemic baseline.

By the numbers: AI job postings made up 4.2% of overall postings by the end of 2025, up from 1.9% two years ago.

• Put another way: Around 1 in 25 job listings now reference AI.

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• OpenAI's "secret" new device is coming. Here's what we know so far. (Axios)
• The Singapore government announced it will invest about $780 million in public AI research through 2030. (Reuters)
• Military-affiliated researchers in China are using animal-behavior simulations, including hawks and coyotes, to train AI for autonomous drone swarms. (Wall Street Journal)
• The EU has launched an investigation into Elon Musk's Grok chatbot over concerns about its ability to generate sexually explicit images. (News release)

While staying near Zurich, I took a day trip to the smaller town of Winterthur, where the clock-and-watch museum also featured an exhibit on glitter. I guess "shiny" was the common theme.