Salesforce’s CEO backtracks after saying Trump should send troops into San Francisco

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Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host and editor, Blake Montgomery. What I’m watching this week: South Park’s caricature of Peter Thiel and his obsession with the antichrist. Read our reporting on the show’s inspiration: Thiel’s bizarre off-the-record lectures on the subject. And now, let’s get into things.

Marc Benioff catches Trump’s attention

The co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, said last week that Donald Trump should make good on his threats to send the US national guard into San Francisco, despite resistance from local leaders. Even Marc Benioff’s own public relations manager was aghast at his remarks, according to the New York Times.

Benioff is a local power player in the City by the Bay. His company is the city’s largest private employer. His statement published just as his company’s marquee conference, Dreamforce, was beginning, taking over the city’s streets in its own way. With a net worth of about $9bn, per Forbes – far less than Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk – he punches above his weight politically, especially in Democratic circles.

His comments were at odds with his liberal image and past statements, though not with how Salesforce conducts business. They divided tech leaders. One of Salesforce’s board members resigned in response, but Musk loved them. My colleague Dani Anguiano wrote: “David Sacks, a major Trump donor who the president appointed to serve as his AI and crypto czar, argued a ‘targeted operation’ could quickly clean up San Francisco while Benioff suggested troops could help with policing duties.”

Benioff apologized on Friday, saying he had “listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials … I do not believe the national guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco.” He said Dreamforce’s security had been the main motivator for his statement.

Perhaps Benioff got what he wanted from the remark without expending too much political capital, all told. He seems to have found sympathetic ears in Trump’s administration. On Monday, the president seemed to address him, claiming “unquestioned power” to send federal troops to San Francisco.

“We’re gonna go to San Francisco. The difference is I think they want us in San Francisco,” Trump said in an interview.

Amazon Web Services outage highlights danger of centralization

people walk by sign that says ‘aws’ in white

My colleagues Dan Milmo and Graeme Wearden report on yesterday’s widespread outage at Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services:

A glitch at Amazon’s cloud computing service brought down apps and websites around the world on Monday.

The affected platforms included Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.

More than 1,000 companies worldwide were affected, according to Downdetector, a site that monitors internet outages, with 6.5m reports of problems from users including more than 1m reports in the US, 400,000 in the UK and 200,000 in Australia.

Experts have warned of the perils of relying on a small number of companies for operating the global internet. The outage underlined the dangers of the internet’s reliance on a small number of tech companies, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google playing a key role in the cloud market.

Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation Article 19, said: “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”

OpenAI’s Sora makes puppets of historical figures

Photograph: Algi Febri Sugita/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

OpenAI’s Sora, an AI-powered video generation app, has enjoyed runaway success in the weeks since its launch. That’s thanks in large part to the capability to generate videos of your own face and those of your friends. I cast my friend who’s running the New York City marathon soon in his own jogging version of Ratatouille, for instance.

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Sora also allows users to generate videos featuring the likenesses of dead famous figures. Of particular note and consequence in that realm: Martin Luther King Jr, who appeared in hundreds of AI-generated videos from Sora’s launch until Friday, when the company announced it would halt the use of his face after complaints from his estate.

As Niamh Rowe reports: “One video high on my feed shows King making monkey sounds during his I Have a Dream speech. Others depict Bryant re-enacting the helicopter crash that killed him and his daughter.”

The daughter’s of other notable figures have made similar complaints. Malcolm X’s daughter said videos of her father were “deeply disrespectful and hurtful”. Clips using the likeness of the late comedian George Carlin were “overwhelming, and depressing”, his daughter said in a BlueSky post. Robin Williams’s daughter said via Instagram that AI-made videos of her father were “NOT what he’d want”.

Zelda Williams wrote: “To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to … horrible, TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening.”

We’ve seen this dynamic play out repeatedly with OpenAI – the company is less sensitive to reputational risk than incumbents like Meta, which released an AI-powered video generation app without the feature of deepfaking your friends at the same time as Sora. And Google withheld its version of ChatGPT for similar reasons, and OpenAI, an insurgent AI David, beat the Goliath of Google to the punch. It was enough for Google to temporarily shutter its image-generation app when people used it to create impossibly ethnically diverse Vikings. One shudders to imagine the blowback it would have received if it had allowed its users to run buckwild with the face of MLK Jr.