Incidents and actions from tracked entities.
Under Tim Cook's leadership, Apple announced in April 2025 that it has surpassed 60% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions from 2015 levels, on track for its Apple 2030 goal of 75% reduction and full carbon neutrality. Over 320 suppliers (95% of manufacturing spend) have transitioned to renewable energy.
While many tech companies rolled back DEI under Trump pressure, Wise implemented stronger governance structure across all 13 global DEI communities in 2025. Programs include Women Circles (speaker-led networking), Women in Product events, and investment in senior women and non-binary external community. Gender pay gap reduced from 19.54% to 14.54% mean, 18.4% to 12.67% median.
Starling Bank reported progress on gender diversity: over a third of new hires between April 2024 and April 2025 were women (up from 24%), and the median pay gap reduced from 9.1% to 8.4%. Senior management gender representation exceeds both the fintech industry average (30%) and UK banking average (40%). The bank is a signatory to the Women in Finance Charter.
In April 2025, IBM eliminated its DEI department and Diversity Council (established in the 1990s), stopped linking executive compensation to workforce diversity targets, and altered its supplier diversity program. The changes came after conservative activist Robby Starbuck contacted IBM in February and Heritage Foundation filed a shareholder proposal. CEO Arvind Krishna announced the changes via memo and video to employees.
Eric Schmidt characterized Trump's research funding cuts as an 'attack on science' that could chill tech development as competition from China ramps up. At the AI+Biotechnology Summit, he said 'This madness will eventually end because it's too stupid not to fix.'
In April 2025, U.S. investment firm Integrity Partners acquired sanctioned Israeli spyware maker Candiru for $30 million. The deal transferred all employees to a new entity not subject to U.S. sanctions, demonstrating a critical enforcement gap: an American company investing in an Entity List company undermines U.S. government spyware constraints.
Briskin v. Shopify class action lawsuit alleged the Shop app collected user personal data and shopping behavior without adequate consent, sharing it with third parties.
Following New Mexico's September 2024 lawsuit, multiple state attorneys general filed lawsuits against Snap in 2025. Florida AG sued in April 2025 alleging failure to protect children from predators and drug dealers. Utah AG sued in June 2025 alleging the app enabled sexual exploitation and digital addiction, with My AI chatbot advising minors on concealing drugs and alcohol. Kansas AG sued in September 2025 alleging Snap misrepresented app safety with '12+' ratings while exposing users to mature content. NYC sued in October 2025 alleging gross negligence.
In April 2025, Sam Altman resigned as chairman of Oklo Inc., a nuclear energy company he co-founded in 2021 via a SPAC. He stepped down specifically to 'avoid conflict of interest' and 'open up opportunities for future deals between OpenAI and Oklo.' The voluntary recusal was notable given the governance criticisms Altman had faced regarding undisclosed conflicts of interest at OpenAI.
Google DeepMind routinely enforces non-compete clauses extending up to 12 months on departing employees, paired with continued salary payments effectively placing staff on 'paid garden leave.' While financially compensated, former employees have described the restrictions as an 'abuse of power,' with some considering relocating from the UK to California to avoid the contractual limitations. The practice has drawn criticism for limiting worker mobility in the competitive AI field.
In April 2025, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative formally ended its funding of FWD.us, the immigration reform advocacy group Zuckerberg co-founded in 2013 with an op-ed calling for comprehensive immigration reform. Well over half of the roughly $400 million donated to FWD.us since its founding came through CZI. By late 2022, CZI had begun pivoting away from social advocacy, and the break was formalized in April 2025. The timing aligned with Zuckerberg's broader rightward political recalibration during the Trump era.
Palantir signed a $30M contract to build 'ImmigrationOS' for ICE -- an AI-powered system to track immigrants' movements and streamline deportations. Total Palantir-ICE contracts exceeded $81M since January 2025. The contract sparked nationwide protests in NYC, Seattle, Palo Alto, Denver, and DC. EFF questioned whether Palantir was honoring its human rights policy. CEO Alex Karp told protesters 'you should be protesting for more Palantir.'
Atlassian presents the Women Leading Tech Awards, an industry initiative supporting gender parity inclusive of non-binary and gender diverse members of tech. The company offers 26 weeks paid leave for birthing parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents. Atlassian conducts yearly pay equity audits, partners with Code2College, /dev/color, and AI4All for underrepresented groups, and operates 9 employee resource groups including Atlassian Pride.
Block announced layoffs affecting 931 employees, approximately 8% of its workforce, following a previous round of roughly 1,000 layoffs in January 2024. CEO Jack Dorsey categorized the cuts as 391 people eliminated for being 'off strategy,' 460 workers terminated for performance (scoring below on internal metrics), and 80 managers removed to flatten the hierarchy. The layoffs were communicated via a company-wide email from Dorsey.
In March 2025, senior Trump administration officials including the National Security Advisor used Signal to discuss classified military strike plans against Yemen's Houthis, and inadvertently added The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the group. While this demonstrated trust in Signal's encryption, it highlighted that the app was not approved for classified communications.
23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2025, raising serious concerns about the fate of genetic data from 15 million customers. Multiple state attorneys general urged users to delete their data before a potential sale.
Reporting beginning in March 2025 (The Register, corroborated by The Hindu, Hindustan Times, and Indian business press) found IBM was cutting an estimated 9,000 US jobs (roughly 3.6% of its 250,000+ global workforce) across Cloud Classic, consulting, sales, corporate social responsibility, and internal IT/CIO-reporting teams, concentrated in Raleigh NC, New York, Dallas, and California. IBM did not make an official public announcement of the cuts, describing workforce changes internally as 'resource actions' or 'workforce rebalancing.' Affected US employees reported being offered separation agreements and, in some cases, asked to train India-based replacements before departing. CEO Arvind Krishna has been publicly open about shifting IBM's labor focus toward India, where job postings substantially outnumbered US openings (roughly 2,900 India openings vs. far fewer in the US as of early 2025), with expansion concentrated in cloud, infrastructure, sales, and consulting roles in Pune and Chennai.
Citizen Lab's March 2025 forensic report identified Paragon Solutions' Graphite spyware infrastructure operating in 12 jurisdictions including Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. While Paragon publicly marketed itself as selling only to democracies and committing to no targeting of journalists or civil society, Citizen Lab's evidence raised questions about how those commitments were enforced. Paragon disputed some findings.
Uber stopped using DEI goals for executive compensation, dropped promises to include women and minority candidates when filling board seats, and removed statistics about board diversity from its 2025 proxy statement. The company's 2024 annual report omitted sections about diversity efforts and didn't mention the word 'diversity' at all.
In March 2025 interview on Semafor's Mixed Signals podcast, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan stood by the platform's controversial suppression of COVID-era content labeled 'health misinformation,' offering no apologies. When asked whether YouTube would restore RFK Jr. videos (now HHS Secretary) that were removed during the pandemic, Mohan gave no commitment, though he noted YouTube has 'deprecated' most COVID-19 moderation rules—effectively admitting they are no longer necessary.
Nokia has been recognized by Ethisphere as one of the World's Most Ethical Companies for the eighth time overall in 2025. The company is one of only two telecommunications companies and the only Finnish company to be honored. Recognition is based on strong business ethics, governance, and sustainability practices.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak criticized Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE mass firings and treatment of Ukraine, calling them 'bullies.' He said 'If you're in school, the bully is going to force their way on the little guy' and added about Musk: 'Sometimes you get so rich at these big companies, and you're on top — it goes to your head.'
On March 5, 2025, Salesforce filed its annual report removing all references to DEI, diversity hiring targets, and language about diversity being a 'core value'. The section was renamed 'Equality' and now only discusses legal compliance with anti-discrimination laws. Previously, Salesforce had goals to increase underrepresented minority leadership by 50% and achieve 40% women/non-binary representation by 2026.
In early March 2025, Anthropic quietly removed several voluntary commitments made in conjunction with the Biden administration in 2023 from its transparency hub, including pledges to share information on managing AI risks and research on AI bias and discrimination. Co-founder Jack Clark later stated this was unintentional and they were working on a fix.
In March 2025, Andreessen Horowitz paused its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund, which since 2020 had supported 60+ companies from underserved communities including women and minority founders. Several employees were laid off in October 2024. The Fearless Fund lawsuit created legal precedent making such programs 'extremely vulnerable.'
Unlike in 2017 when DoorDash CEO promised free food to lawyers supporting immigrants and refugees, the company has been silent on immigration in Trump's second term. While delivery workers—many of them immigrants—continue doing the actual delivering, DoorDash and other delivery companies are offering no immigration help or legal support, despite earlier commitments.
The ACLU filed a complaint in March 2025 alleging HireVue's AI hiring tools violated anti-discrimination laws by systematically disadvantaging candidates based on race, disability, and other protected characteristics.
When Google released Gemini 2.5 Pro in March 2025, the company failed to publish a model card with capabilities and risk assessments. This violated pledges made at the UK-South Korea AI Summit (Feb 2024), White House Commitments (2023), and EU AI Code of Conduct (Oct 2023). 60 UK lawmakers signed open letter accusing Google DeepMind of 'breach of trust'.
Nvidia's fiscal 2024 and 2025 due diligence processes revealed multiple supplier non-compliance issues including hiring fees charged to workers, document and passport retention, excessive working hours, and penalties for leaving employers before specified time periods. An independent human rights assessment commissioned by Nvidia found forced labor and child labor to be salient risks in the supply chain.
In March 2025, TSMC announced over $100 billion in US investments at an event with President Trump at their Arizona facility. The company is building multiple advanced chip fabs in Phoenix as part of US efforts to onshore semiconductor manufacturing under the CHIPS Act.