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Throughout 2023-2024, Yann LeCun was one of the most vocal critics of AI existential risk narratives. He called concerns about AI existential risk 'preposterous' (June 2023) and 'complete B.S.' (October 2024), publicly disagreeing with fellow AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. He argued the AI alignment problem has been 'ridiculously overblown' and that it is 'way too early to regulate' AI to prevent existential risk. He debated Eliezer Yudkowsky on alignment feasibility and estimated P(doom) at less than 1%.

During the June 2023 API pricing protests, when approximately 8,500 subreddits went private or restricted, some communities labeled themselves NSFW in continued protest. Reddit administrators responded by removing entire moderation teams from protesting subreddits, citing violations of the Moderator Code of Conduct. CEO Steve Huffman dismissed the protest, saying 'It's a small group that's very upset' and telling employees internally that the protest 'will pass.'

During the June 2023 Reddit API controversy, CEO Steve Huffman called protesting volunteer moderators 'landed gentry,' comparing them unfavorably to democratically accountable leaders. Despite relying on unpaid moderator labor estimated at 466 hours per day ($3.4M annually at $20/hour), Huffman refused to compensate them or invest in paid moderation. On June 22, Reddit began pressuring subreddits continuing their blackout to reopen, threatening to install new moderators. Huffman dismissed the protest of 8,500+ subreddits as a 'small group' that is 'very upset' and said the blackout 'will pass.' The stance demonstrated contempt for volunteer labor essential to Reddit's platform while extracting value from their unpaid work.

In 2023, YouTube significantly expanded creator monetization opportunities. In February, YouTube launched Shorts revenue sharing giving creators 45% of allocated ad revenue. In June 2023, YouTube lowered Partner Program eligibility thresholds from 1,000 to 500 subscribers and from 4,000 to 3,000 watch hours, enabling more emerging creators to earn money. The lower tier initially provided access to fan funding features (Super Chat, Super Thanks, channel memberships), with ad revenue sharing unlocking at the existing thresholds.

In June 2023, Reddit implemented API pricing changes that effectively killed third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync. The pricing ($12,000 per 50 million requests) was prohibitively expensive. Over 8,000 subreddits participated in blackout protests. CEO Steve Huffman compared volunteer moderators to 'landed gentry' during the controversy.

In June 2023, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told employees that Apollo developer Christian Selig was blackmailing the company for $10 million. Selig publicly refuted the claim with audio recordings of his conversation with a Reddit employee that disproved the extortion allegation. In a June 9, 2023 AMA, Huffman doubled down, criticizing Selig for 'recording and leaking a private phone call' and saying he didn't know how Reddit could do business with him. The false accusation appeared to be retaliation against Selig for publicly disclosing Reddit's prohibitive API pricing that would force Apollo to shut down.

On June 6, 2023, the SEC filed suit against Coinbase alleging it violated federal securities laws by operating as an unregistered exchange, broker, and clearing agency, and by offering unregistered securities through its staking program. In March 2024, a federal court rejected nearly all of Coinbase's challenges. However, after Coinbase donated over $75M to Fairshake PAC supporting pro-crypto candidates and $1M to Trump's 2025 inauguration fund, the SEC dropped the case on February 21, 2025 under the new Trump-appointed SEC leadership, raising regulatory capture concerns.

In June 2023, Sequoia Capital announced it would split its China operations into an independent entity called HongShan, completed by March 2024. The US House Select Committee on the CCP later revealed that Sequoia China had invested in companies supporting PLA military modernization and CCP surveillance, including EverSec (PLA cybersecurity) and 4Paradigm (PLA battlefield AI). Congress raised concerns that the split was designed to avoid regulatory scrutiny while allowing continued US capital flow to problematic investments, and that HongShan would likely scrap the national security screening mechanism Sequoia had established.

SEC alleged Binance used Sigma Chain, a trading firm owned by CZ, to inflate trading volumes through wash trading. The firm reportedly executed over $300 million in wash trades.

Jack Dorsey publicly endorsed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president in June 2023, saying Kennedy was 'focused on peace' and had 'a grasp of all of the issues.' Kennedy is known for anti-vaccine views. Dorsey later reneged on a promised $5M donation to Kennedy's super PAC.

In June 2023, YouTube reversed its policy of removing content making false claims about the 2020 US presidential election being stolen. The platform had previously removed 'tens of thousands' of such videos since December 2020. YouTube stated the reversal was because 'removing this content does curb some misinformation' but 'could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech.' Critics argued this enabled continued spread of election denialism.

Court filings revealed Meta engineers torrented 81.7 terabytes of copyrighted books from Library Genesis, Z-Library, and Anna's Archive to train Llama models. Internal emails showed Meta director Sony Theakanath confirmed 'GenAI has been approved to use LibGen for Llama 3' after escalation to Mark Zuckerberg, with explicit instruction to never publicly disclose the use. Engineers wrote scripts to strip copyright notices from ebooks. A June 2025 ruling found this piracy was not protected by fair use.

A June 2023 Forbes investigation citing 30+ sources found Emad Mostaque misled investors about his educational background (claimed Oxford master's degree he never completed), overstated his role at a hedge fund (junior analyst, not key decision-maker), and made unsubstantiated partnership claims with the UN, WHO, World Bank, OECD, and government of Malawi - all of which denied partnerships. Multiple sources also told Bloomberg he claimed to have been a 'secret agent' in the UK government.

Reddit laid off approximately 5% of its workforce, equivalent to 90 employees, in 2023. According to The Wall Street Journal, CEO Steve Huffman said the company would subsequently reduce hiring to about 100 from the initial plan of 300 for the year 2023. The layoffs came shortly before the controversial API pricing changes that sparked community protests, suggesting workforce reduction was part of preparation for the company's IPO.

Analysis by Issue One and Public Citizen found that 85% of Meta's registered federal lobbyists were former government employees as the company faced FTC antitrust litigation. Meta's D.C. lobbying operation expanded significantly during 2023-2024, hiring former officials from DOJ, FTC, and congressional staff. This pattern of revolving-door hiring was part of a broader tech industry trend where 75% of FTC officials had corporate conflicts of interest.

Between 2022 and early 2024, BYJU'S shed approximately 46,000 employees through multiple rounds of layoffs, reducing headcount from roughly 60,000 to about 14,000. The layoffs occurred as the company faced mounting financial difficulties, delayed financial filings, and growing investor concerns. The mass reductions affected employees across departments and geographies.

Koa Health published results of its 2022-2023 ethics audit conducted by Eticas, showing 24% improvement from the prior year. The Koa Foundations app achieved perfect ratings in bias reduction categories with no disparate impact or undesired bias found. The company maintains a public Ethics Impact Assessment framework.

Block operates one of the largest open source programs in fintech, with over 500 repositories across multiple GitHub organizations (Block, Square, TBD, Web5). Key contributions include the Lightning Development Kit (LDK) for Bitcoin Lightning Network integration, the tbDEX open-source liquidity protocol, Web5 decentralized identity platform, and Bitcoin cold storage tools (Subzero). Block also provides grants to independent Bitcoin developers through its Spiral program and conducts design, roadmap, and code reviews in public by default.

In June 2023, Senator Bernie Sanders opened a formal Senate investigation into Amazon warehouse conditions, citing injury rates more than double the industry average (6.6 vs 3.2 serious injuries per 100 workers at non-Amazon warehouses). Jassy responded in his shareholder letter by claiming Amazon's safety record was 'misunderstood' and 'about average relative to peers,' despite data showing otherwise. The investigation led to ongoing congressional scrutiny of Amazon's labor practices.

In 2023, IBM achieved its target of reducing operational greenhouse gas emissions by 65% compared to 2010 baseline levels, reaching this milestone two years ahead of its original 2025 deadline. This was part of IBM's broader net-zero by 2030 strategy, demonstrating concrete progress on climate commitments rather than just setting targets.

Mistral AI hosts all services exclusively in the European Union, with full GDPR compliance built-in. The company offers Data Processing Agreements (DPA) for enterprise customers and provides self-hosting options for their open-source models, giving organizations total data control. Le Chat Pro does not use user inputs for model training. Mistral prioritizes selecting providers within the EU that strictly adhere to GDPR regulations.

A whistleblower exposed that Samsung concealed approximately 13,000 environmental compliance violations at its Vietnam manufacturing facilities. The whistleblower, who worked in compliance monitoring, revealed systematic underreporting of violations to Vietnamese authorities. This followed Samsung's legacy of workplace safety issues including 320+ occupational disease cases and 118 deaths historically attributed to semiconductor and display manufacturing exposure to toxic chemicals.

Leaked internal Foxconn recruitment documents from 2023 contained explicit instructions to recruiters to reject applicants from Uyghur, Tibetan, Yi, and Hui ethnic backgrounds. The documents cited 'political risks' and 'management difficulties' as rationale. This systematic discrimination violates China's own labor laws and international human rights standards, and mirrors broader CCP policies targeting ethnic minorities.

In 2023, ASML's hiring practices caused controversy when a Rotterdam anti-discrimination foundation filed a complaint over the company rejecting job applicants from certain countries. ASML routinely checks whether employees perform export-controlled work and requires 'the employee must have nationality or permanent residency in a country that does not fall into one of the US Commerce Department's D:1, E:1 or E:2 country groups,' which include Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and about 20 other countries including China and Russia. The Netherlands' Institute for Human Rights affirmed ASML may refuse applicants when required by US export rules.

In 2023, Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro portable SSDs experienced widespread firmware failures causing sudden data loss with no recovery possible. A class action lawsuit was filed. The failures affected both the 2TB and 4TB models. WD released firmware updates but many users reported irreversible data loss before the fix was available.

From mid-2023 through 2024, Mistral AI conducted an aggressive lobbying campaign against EU AI Act provisions. The campaign was led by co-founder Cédric O, France's former Secretary of State for Digital Affairs, who joined Mistral in spring 2023 and immediately began lobbying his former government colleagues. O's initial €176 investment grew to approximately €23 million while he lobbied for exemptions that would directly benefit the company - a conflict he did not publicly disclose. Meanwhile, Mistral argued that strict regulation would force European companies to partner with US tech giants, while secretly negotiating a deal with Microsoft that was announced in February 2024. The campaign succeeded: the final AI Act gave broad exemptions to open-source models and general-purpose AI, with only minimal transparency obligations. Fundamental rights checks were removed, and foundation model requirements were significantly weakened.

Micron's planned Clay, New York fabrication plant would require 48 million gallons of water per day -- double initial estimates and exceeding the entire city of Syracuse's daily usage (40 million gallons). Requires a new 54-inch diameter pipeline costing potentially $100 million. Wastewater treatment plant estimated at $1.4-2.6 billion. Environmental review was 20,000 pages with only 45 days and one public hearing for comment.

In May 2023, the FTC charged Amazon with violating children's privacy law (COPPA) by retaining kids' Alexa voice recordings indefinitely and undermining parental deletion requests ($25M fine). Separately, Ring was fined $5.8M after an employee viewed thousands of videos from 81+ female users' cameras in intimate spaces. Ring's security failures from 2016-2020 also enabled hackers to access consumer accounts and cameras.

In May 2023, Eclypsium researchers discovered that 271 Gigabyte motherboard models contained a hidden UEFI firmware mechanism that dropped a Windows executable to download and execute payloads insecurely. The updater used unencrypted HTTP connections without proper authentication, making man-in-the-middle attacks possible. Approximately 7 million devices were affected. Gigabyte released BIOS updates with signature verification.

Demis Hassabis signed the Center for AI Safety statement: 'Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.' He assessed his own P(doom) as 'non-zero' and 'worth very seriously considering.'