Washington state regulators ordered Seattle-based cryptocurrency company Coinme to stop transmitting money for customers in the state, alleging the startup improperly claimed more than $8 million in customer funds as its own income.

The Washington State Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) announced Monday that it issued a temporary cease-and-desist order and statement of charges against Coinme, which lets people buy crypto with cash at kiosks nationwide and says it runs the largest crypto cash network in the world.

DFI said Coinme improperly treated more than $8 million owed to customers on unredeemed crypto “vouchers” as company income. The agency said Coinme did not adequately disclose how and when it would recognize those unredeemed amounts as revenue and failed to turn unclaimed funds over to the state as required under Washington’s unclaimed property laws.

DFI said those issues amount to unfair and deceptive practices and “unsafe and unsound” conduct that could lead to insolvency or loss of customer funds.

DFI also alleged that Coinme failed to maintain required financial reserves, filed inaccurate reports, and listed an inactive customer support phone number on vouchers for several months last year. The company had a negative tangible net worth at year-end 2022, 2023, and 2024, according to the charges.

The agency is seeking to revoke the company’s money transmitter license, impose a $300,000 fine, and ban CEO and co-founder Neil Bergquist from Washington’s money transmitter and currency-exchange industry for 10 years.

“Washington’s money transmission laws exist to protect consumers that rely on licensed companies to safely transmit funds,” DFI Director Charlie Clark said in a statement. “When our investigations reveal serious violations, we will take appropriate action.”

Coinme pushed back on the allegations, calling it an accounting dispute over a discontinued product. In a statement, the company said it eliminated the voucher system in August 2023 and now credits purchases instantly to customer accounts.

“Following professional guidance, we treated unredeemed voucher payments the same way major retailers treat unredeemed gift cards — a widely accepted accounting practice,” Ben Enea, Coinme’s chief compliance officer, said in a statement.

The company said all vouchers can still be redeemed at any time with no expiration date, and customers can request refunds in U.S. dollars if they prefer. Coinme noted that the unredeemed vouchers represent less than 1% of the more than $1 billion in transactions the company has processed since its 2014 founding.

Coinme also expressed frustration with the regulatory process, claiming it wasn’t contacted during the investigation and only learned of the concerns when the order was announced.

Under the temporary order, existing Washington customers can still withdraw their assets but no new business is permitted.

The company, which raised $10 million in 2021, was licensed by Washington state in April 2014 and soon after launched its first “Bitcoin ATM.” It now operates cryptocurrency kiosks through partnerships with MoneyGram and Coinstar.

Coinme said it has requested an administrative hearing to contest the order.

Govstream.ai, a Seattle-area startup building AI-native permitting tools for local governments, raised $3.6 million in funding, the company announced Thursday.

The seed round was led by Menlo Park, Calif.-based 47th Street Partners, with participation from Nellore Capital of Palo Alto, Calif., Seattle-based Ascend, and angel investors including Socrata founder Kevin Merritt and First Due co-founder and CEO Andreas Huber.

Govstream.ai’s platform sits on top of the systems cities already use and acts as a conversational “copilot” for permit techs, planners, and reviewers. The company says the technology answers questions, checks documents, compares plan sets, and helps move applications through review faster.

The first public deployment is with the City of Bellevue, where Govstream.ai’s smart assistant has been helping Development Services staff with internal permitting and zoning questions since this summer.

“Cities are under intense pressure to add housing, support small businesses, and keep development sustainable, all while working inside permitting systems that were never really rethought for this moment,” said Safouen Rabah, founder and CEO of Govstream.ai.

In Washington, for example, state projections show that roughly 1.1 million additional homes will be needed by 2044 to keep up with population growth, and about 650,000 of those will need to be affordable for low-income households.

Rabah said permitting has been digitized in pieces but not truly modernized end to end. AI can reason over hundreds of pages of plans and regulations and surface what matters.

“That’s how cities move more homes and critical infrastructure from ‘submitted’ to ‘approved’ without burning people out on either side of the counter,” Rabah said. “Every month of delay we eliminate reduces costs of a new housing unit by about $5,000 on average and makes more projects economically pencil out.”

In July, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell issued an executive order intended to speed the permitting process for housing and small businesses in the city, using AI software from Boston- and Chicago-based CivCheck to aid permit applicants and city reviewers. Other cities, including Los Angeles, Austin and Honolulu are using AI to improve their processes.

In Bellevue, Govstream.ai is targeting and seeing signs of results including:

• A roughly 30% reduction in the burden of routine inquiries, including fewer “Where do I start?” and “Do I need a permit for this?” calls and emails.
• Up to 50% fewer re-submittals by catching missing or incorrect items before an application is formally filed.
• Up to 2X faster starts to first review on many project types, because reviewers start with context instead of a 200-page PDF.

Beyond Bellevue, the startup is gearing up to deploy in additional U.S. cities. Rabah declined to share financial metrics, but said revenue is growing as Govstream.ai converts design partners into production deployments.

A veteran of government-tech companies including Socrata and Tyler Technologies, Rabah started Govstream.ai in July 2024. The company currently employs five people and the new funding will fuel growth to 10 to 12 people over the next 12 months with the addition of engineering and AI roles in the Seattle area.

Govstream was previously featured in GeekWire’s Startup Radar series.

Amazon has agreed to pay more than $3.7 million to settle claims with the City of Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards (OLS) over allegations that it violated ordinances protecting gig and app-based workers during the pandemic.

OLS said in a news release Wednesday that Amazon only provided premium pay and paid sick and safe time (PSST) to workers when they performed deliveries for Amazon Flex’s food or grocery business lines — but not to workers who performed package deliveries from Amazon’s warehouses.

Amazon Flex uses independent contractors that drive their own vehicles to deliver items for Amazon business lines.

Amazon denied the allegations, but will pay $3,777,924.10, consisting of settlement payments and credits to 10,968 affected workers and $20,000 in fines to the City of Seattle.

The alleged violations cover three city ordinances: Gig Worker Premium Pay, Gig Worker Paid Sick and Safe Time, and App-Based Worker Paid Sick and Safe Time.

OLS alleged that in violation of the Gig Worker Premium Pay ordinance, between Aug. 27, 2021, and Oct. 31, 2022, Amazon failed to provide premium pay to Amazon Flex gig workers for deliveries with a pick-up and/or drop-off in Seattle that were not for its food/grocery business lines.

OLS further alleged violations of the Gig Worker Paid Sick and Safe Time and the App-Based Worker Paid Sick and Safe Time ordinances between Jan. 31, 2021, and Jan. 12, 2024. The agency said Amazon Flex failed to establish an accessible system for gig workers to request and use PSST for workers that were not delivering for its food/grocery business lines, and it failed to provide correct monthly PSST notification to workers that were not delivering food/grocery.

“Gig workers served on the frontlines throughout the pandemic, providing critical services like grocery and food delivery to our vulnerable neighbors and elders,” Mayor Bruce Harrell said in a statement. “These workers remain a valued part of our workforce today and deserve fair pay and protections.”

The Gig Worker Premium Pay and Gig Worker PSST ordinances were temporary ordinances enacted during the pandemic to allow gig workers access to extra pay and sick leave benefits. With the lifting of the mayor’s emergency order on Oct. 31, 2022, the two ordinances are no longer in effect.

The settlement with Amazon Flex is the second largest in OLS history, according to OLS Director Steven Marchese.

In August, Uber Eats agreed to pay $15 million to more than 16,000 delivery workers in Seattle over allegations that the tech giant violated laws regulating how workers are paid. A majority of that settlement was related to the city’s Independent Contractor Protections (ICP) Ordinance, which passed in 2021 and aims to ensure pay transparency. 

Affected Amazon Flex workers can expect settlement payments starting around Jan. 1, according to OLS.

Update: Amazon provided the following statement to GeekWire on Wednesday:

“The Puget Sound region is our home, and we’re proud to serve customers here while supporting the community through good job opportunities, support for local small businesses and organizations, and hundreds of millions in local investments. We’ve always complied with Seattle laws relating to providing paid sick and safe time to delivery partners — including when the City Council enacted emergency measures during the pandemic for food delivery app-based workers, and following the 2024 expansion of the rule to include all app-based workers. While we strongly disagree with OLS on the facts of this matter, we’re pleased to put it behind us and remain focused on continuing to improve the experience for our customers and the drivers who deliver to them.”

Washington state is moving to set its own regulatory framework for artificial intelligence in the absence of federal legislation, laying out recommendations for how lawmakers should regulate AI in healthcare, education, policing, workplaces and more.

A new interim report from the Washington state AI Task Force notes that the federal government’s “hands-off approach” to AI has created “a crucial regulatory gap that leaves Washingtonians vulnerable.”

The report lands as the Trump administration pushes a deregulatory national AI policy and briefly considered an executive order to preempt state AI laws before putting the idea on hold after bipartisan pushback, according to Reuters.

The new report published this week notes that AI has “grown more powerful and prevalent than ever before” over the past year, driven by technical advances, the rise of AI agents, and open AI platforms transforming work and daily life.

The report lays out eight recommendations to the Washington state Legislature, including a requirement to improve transparency in AI development — mandating that AI developers publicly disclose the “provenance, quality, quantity and diversity of datasets” used to train models, and explain how training data is processed to mitigate errors and bias. The recommendation includes carve-outs protecting trade secrets.

State lawmakers introduced proposals earlier this year on AI development transparency and disclosure but their bills stalled.

The task force also recommends the creation of a grant program, leveraging public and private money, to support small businesses and startups building AI that serves the public interest — particularly for founders outside the Seattle area and those facing inequitable access to capital.

The report notes that the program would help Washington retain talent and “maintain its relevance as a tech hub.” An earlier bill to create such a program, HB 1833, stalled in the 2025 session.

Other recommendations include:

• Promote responsible AI governance for high-risk systems — defined as those with “potential to significantly impact people’s lives, health, safety, or fundamental rights.”
• Invest in K-12 STEM, higher education AI programs, professional development for teachers, and expanded broadband in rural communities.
• Improve transparency in healthcare prior authorization — requiring that any decision to deny, delay, or modify health services based on medical necessity is made only by qualified clinicians, even when AI tools are used.
• Develop guidelines for AI in the workplace, including a call for employers to disclose when AI is used for employee monitoring, discipline, termination, and promotion.
• Require law enforcement to publicly disclose AI tools they use, including generative AI for report writing, predictive policing systems, license plate readers, and facial recognition.
• Adopt NIST Ethical AI Principles as guiding framework, building on existing state guidance that already relies on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

Most recommendations passed by wide margins, though the law-enforcement transparency proposal drew some dissenting votes from task force members, including a representative from the ACLU.

The interim report does not yet include specific Washington-focused recommendations on generative AI in elections and political ads, AI and intellectual property, or companion chatbots, even as it highlights those issues as areas of growing state activity elsewhere.

Washington is entering the AI policy arena behind some peers that have already put broad frameworks into place, including California and Colorado. Others have targeted specific use cases.

Washington lawmakers introduced multiple AI bills in 2025, but only one passed: HB 1205, which makes it a crime to knowingly distribute a forged digital likeness (deepfake) to defraud, harass, threaten, or intimidate another, or for an unlawful purpose.

The task force report notes that 73 new AI-related laws were enacted in 27 states in 2025 across areas such as child safety, transparency, algorithmic accountability, education, labor, healthcare, public safety, deepfakes, and energy.

Washington’s task force has 19 members spanning tech companies (including Microsoft and Salesforce), labor, civil liberties groups, academia, and state agencies.

The task force, created in 2024, must deliver three reports: a preliminary report released last year, this interim report, and a final report by July 1, 2026.

Read the full interim report below.

Washington state AI task force lays out blueprint for regulation by GeekWire

This story first appeared in the Washington State Standard.

Washington state lawmakers next year are set to again discuss whether public sector unions can bargain over their employers’ adoption of artificial intelligence technology.

House Bill 1622 looks to require government employers to bargain with unions over the use of the technology if it affects wages or worker performance evaluations. 

This past session, the bill passed the House mostly along party lines, with Democratic support, before stalling in the Senate.

Opponents, including business groups and city officials, argued the measure would skew the balance of power between employees and managers too far toward workers. They also said the mandate could delay workplace innovation.

With hopes of getting it over the finish line in 2026, the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Lisa Parshley, D-Olympia, brought the idea to the state’s artificial intelligence task force on Thursday. The Legislature created the task force in 2024.

“Public sector bargaining covers wages, hours and working conditions and agencies are already required to bargain any change that touches those areas, but without legislation, that bargaining happens after implementation,” said Washington State Labor Council President April Sims. “With legislation like House Bill 1622, it would happen before.”

A state law passed in 2002 prohibits bargaining over technology for classified employees of state agencies and higher education institutions. 

“The biggest technology decisions made by management was, what kind of desktop, what kind of fax, what kind of phone,” Parshley said of the era when that law took effect. “Is that fair when we have a technology that now will actually impact our workers in ways that we have not even begun to realize?”

A separate statute governing workers at cities, counties and other agencies, on the other hand, requires bargaining over technology if it affects issues like wages, hours or working conditions.

Many workers are concerned about what the rapid rise of artificial intelligence means for their job security. 

A Pew Research Center survey conducted late last year reported over half of workers are worried about the future impact of AI on the workplace and about one-third think it will lead to fewer jobs. About one-in-six workers said AI was already doing some of their work.

Maryland, for example, is partnering with AI company Anthropic to help residents apply for food aid, Medicaid and other social welfare programs.

In early 2024, then-Gov. Jay Inslee issued an executive order outlining a future for state government’s use of generative artificial intelligence. It noted that the state “seeks to harness the potential of generative AI in an ethical and equitable way for the benefit of the state government workforce.”

In line with that guidance, a September directive from the state’s Office of Financial Management requires giving union-represented state employees six months’ notice of any use of generative AI if it “will result in a consequential change in employee wages, hours, or working conditions.” Under the memo, unions can file a demand to bargain over using the technology.

“Including workers at the beginning is not a courtesy. It is a practical necessity,” Sims said. “It identifies risk. It ensures human oversight where it is needed, and it builds trust among staff, who will ultimately have to operate, troubleshoot and rely on these systems.”

The memo also mandates human review for such systems when they’re used for employment-related decisions.

Parshley called the directive an “excellent first step.” But she says her proposed law “would allow future administrations to be held accountable” by codifying the order in law.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is reportedly considering an executive order directing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to sue states that pass regulations on AI. But it’s unclear if that would cover potential laws like this one, since it doesn’t directly regulate the technology itself.

It’s the latest salvo in the debate over a federal versus state approach to guardrails on the technology. In the debate over Trump’s signature tax cut and spending law over the summer, Congress considered putting a moratorium on state-level artificial intelligence regulations. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., led the charge to axe that provision from the final law.

One potential measure requested by state Attorney General Nick Brown could put Washington in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. 

Senate Bill 5708 looks to protect children from artificial intelligence-fed social media applications. This year, the legislation passed the Senate before stalling in the House. It can come back in 2026.

Parshley noted she is part of a new workgroup in the Legislature focused on AI “so that we can participate in this great debate.”

Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com.

There’s a quantum paradox in Washington.

The state has strong ingredients for a quantum technology hub: powerful giants like Microsoft and Amazon, a hardware leader in IonQ, and world-class research at UW and PNNL. Yet it may be falling behind states like Illinois, Montana, and Colorado that are pushing forward on quantum.

Washington needs more speed and a better strategy to help bolster the region’s quantum ecosystem, according to panelists who spoke this week in Seattle at a Tech Alliance event focused on quantum technologies, which aim to solve complex problems and power new innovations faster than traditional computers.

Rep. Stephanie Barnard, a Republican who represents the 8th Legislative District in Eastern Washington, expressed a desire to inject $100 million as a way “to get quantum going where it needs to be.”

“It takes courage. It takes dynamic leadership,” Barnard said. “It takes a political will to recognize the needs of this state.”

But financial woes pose a roadblock with the state facing revenue declines. Beau Perschbacher, policy advisor for Gov. Bob Ferguson, offered a reality check.

“Big new significant investments at this time [are] going to be very hard,” he said, while suggesting the state focus on coordination and workforce strategy in the short-term.

“We don’t have to make a huge capital investment — but you can still really advance the cause,” he said.

Other states are charging ahead. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently earmarked $500 million for a quantum campus near Chicago. States including Montana, Maryland, Colorado are moving forward on strategy and workforce investment.

Barnard suggested that Washington might need to stop subsidizing established industries to fund emerging ones. She pointed to the hundreds of millions the state has invested in solar incentives.

“If you subsidized quantum $300 million over the next 10 years, think of where you would be,” she said. “So we need to maybe shift priorities.”

Washington state had budget language for a quantum strategy in 2025, but it was vetoed due to fiscal constraints, with the Department of Commerce directed to pursue partnerships and policy recommendations.

Quantum researchers will “go to where the funding is and where the environment favors success,” said University of Washington professor Charles Marcus, who serves as director of Northwest Quantum Nexus, a public-private coalition supporting the growth of the state’s quantum ecosystem.

Marcus called on companies to support a dedicated master’s program to churn out graduates ready to work immediately.

“The master’s program is what industry needs regionally,” said Marcus, “It needs a small number of PhDs, but it needs a large number of masters.”

Marcus described the quantum race as one “in which, if you’re standing still, you’re going backwards.”

Momentum has been building to help boost Washington’s position in quantum. In 2023, regional tech leaders said Washington had a chance to create a “Quantum Valley” modeled after Silicon Valley. 

Laura Ruderman, CEO of Tech Alliance who moderated the panel discussion this week, suggested that the near-term prescription isn’t to build a new initiative but rather scaling what already exists. “We need to fund NQN,” she said, referencing the Northwest Quantum Nexus, which was founded in 2019 by UW, Microsoft, and PNNL.

Margaret Arakawa, CMO of quantum giant IonQ, which recently opened the first dedicated quantum computer manufacturing facility in the U.S. near Seattle, said Washington’s leaders need to show up publicly and enlist private funding partners. She said states that are winning have governors who make quantum a visible priority and then bring industry in to co-invest.

“Please let it happen now, and don’t wait,” Arakawa urged.

University of Washington President Robert Jones wants to expand computer science access for undergraduates and build new public-private partnerships to tackle society’s grand challenges — and he has concrete ideas on how to make that happen.

More than 100 days into his tenure as the UW’s 34th president, Jones is also working to dispel two persistent myths: that it’s nearly impossible to get into the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and that AI is taking everyone’s jobs.

This fall, the Allen School — a top tech program nationally — accepted 37% of the direct applicants from Washington state high schools, though out-of-state admissions is only 4%. “We actually accept many more students than the general public believes,” Jones said in an interview this week with GeekWire.

As to the AI job apocalypse? “That’s an overblown fear,” Jones said. AI is a “critically important tool to have in your tool chest to be more effective in the future.”

Drawing on his experience leading the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Jones wants to give a bigger slice of the UW’s 45,000 undergraduates access to computer science courses — even if they’re in unrelated degree programs.

The idea is modeled on the groundbreaking “CS + X” initiative that he helped expand during his past presidency in Illinois. The program created tech-infused studies in 17 degree programs including advertising, astronomy, economics, music, philosophy and physics.

In Illinois, CS + X launched in crop sciences more than a decade ago because agricultural tech was, and continues to be, one of the fastest growing sectors in the state. Jones himself began his career as a professor in plant physiology and became an international authority in the field.

“AI is just an amazing tool, and we’re doing work here to try to make sure that our students are getting as comprehensive an education as possible,” Jones said. Bolstering a graduate’s knowledge of computer science and artificial intelligence in addition to their focus area makes them “much more employable.”

A $10 million gift announced Tuesday from Microsoft pioneer Charles Simonyi and his wife, Lisa Simonyi, will help facilitate the integration of AI into education and research across the university through the newly formed AI@UW initiative.

AI@UW, which includes a new Vice Provost for Artificial Intelligence position, will help the UW maintain its “strategic advantage” as an AI leader, Jones said. It’s also an example of the sort of public-private collaborations he’d like to foster.

“Radical partnerships”

Jones envisions expanding what he calls “radical partnerships” — building diverse coalitions across geographies, institutions and sectors to tackle problems “that are too big for any one entity to solve alone.”

The collaborations can bring together both expertise and funding. The university faces a difficult financial landscape as Washington state’s revenue forecast continues to weaken, drawing down an already strained budget. Add to that ongoing worries about funding cuts to federal research programs that the UW heavily relies upon.

Jones pointed to the university’s long-running WWAMI program, which serves medical students from Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho who earn their degrees at the UW and return to their communities to practice medicine, as a prime example of the radical partnership approach.

“I’ve done about three or four of these over the last 10 years,” he said, “and they’re just amazing ways to bring people together and to think about doing research in a different, in a much more collaborative, much more impactful way than we’ve ever thought about.”

The strategy is particularly suited to AI, quantum computing or other massive technological challenges, he said. Jones was involved in partnerships with the University of Chicago to bolster quantum science research in Illinois and a human biology collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago.

In future collaborations in his new role, Jones is eager to work “seamlessly” with the region’s tech sector, leveraging the fact that the UW helped create an ecosystem that includes giants like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as hundreds of smaller companies.

“Given Dr. Jones’s work creating the quantum park in Chicago, I have no doubt that we will continue to see the UW play an integral role in the growth of the ecosystem,” said Laura Ruderman, CEO of the TechAlliance, who also called the UW “critical” to the state’s innovation economy.

More than 110 UW spinoffs currently operate in the state, according to the university’s CoMotion program, which supports entrepreneurship.

“What we have to do more of is working together to fund and to create the next big idea that’s going to be transformative,” Jones said, “not only for the state of Washington, but for the nation and the world.”

Reports emerged Wednesday that the White House is preparing an executive order directing federal agencies to challenge or block state-level AI regulations.

Seattle entrepreneur Joe Braidwood sees the news as a major opportunity.

Braidwood is CEO and co-founder of Glacis, a new startup backed by the AI2 Incubator that is building software to help companies prove that their AI safety measures are executed as intended. Glacis creates tamper-proof “receipts” for every AI decision, allowing companies to prove their safety systems actually ran.

“Think of it as a flight recorder for enterprise AI,” Braidwood said.

Braidwood said the potential White House order to block state AI laws transforms Glacis from a startup just getting off the ground into “infrastructure necessity.” In an environment where the Justice Department would sue states that pass AI rules, a neutral, platform-agnostic trust layer could become increasingly relevant.

Glacis’ origins are rooted in regulatory complexity.

Braidwood, a longtime tech marketing leader, recently shuttered Yara, his year-old startup that aimed to use AI to improve mental wellness. He cited Illinois regulations that made AI therapy “effectively uninsurable.”

In a LinkedIn post that has since gone viral, Braidwood explained the decision to close Yara and open-source a set of safety prompts he had developed.

He wrote that Yara closed after he realized AI became “dangerous” when interacting with people facing deep trauma or suicidal ideation — not just inadequate. The experience, he said, showed “where the boundaries need to be,” and demonstrated how startups working in high-risk AI categories face unmanageable liability and regulatory pressure.

After the post, regulators, clinicians, engineers, founders and insurance executives reached out — many pointing the same problem: when AI systems make decisions, no one can independently verify whether safety policies actually fired.

That clarity became the seed for Glacis.

Every time an AI model answers a question or takes an action, Glacis creates a signed record showing the input, the safety checks that ran, and the final decision. The record can’t be altered and takes less than 50 milliseconds to generate. Regulators and insurers can verify these receipts without seeing any personal data, and Braidwood said insurers believe this could finally make it possible to insure AI systems that can prove they followed the rules.

Braidwood co-founded Glacis with Dr. Jennifer Shannon, a psychiatrist and adjunct professor at the University of Washington.

The company is currently in private beta with digital health customers, including nVoq, and is targeting healthcare, fintech, and insurance sectors. It’s also part of Cloudflare’s Launchpad program.

Braidwood was previously chief strategy officer of Vektor Medical. He also co-founded social TV platform Scener and was chief marketing officer at SwiftKey.

Shannon has been a psychiatrist for nearly two decades. She was also a medical director at Cognoa and serves on the AI Resource Committee for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Following the election of a new mayor in Seattle, one of Amazon’s top executives reaffirmed its commitment to the region Tuesday, promising, “We are not going anywhere.”

David Zapolsky, Amazon chief global affairs and legal officer, made the comment during an Amazon Community Impact Reception at The Spheres in Seattle, where he and others discussed the company’s philanthropic and civic initiatives from housing to food security.

“Obviously, this is a time of change, both in this region and around the world,” Zapolsky said. “Amazon remains committed to our home, this Puget Sound region. We are not going anywhere. And so we remain committed to building this community.”

It’s a rare public reaffirmation of the Seattle region as Amazon’s primary base. It follows years of political disputes over taxes and other city policies that contributed to Amazon shifting more of its workforce to Bellevue, Wash., and Northern Virginia.

With the arrival of Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson, Amazon must once again establish a working relationship with a city leader who ran on promises to address issues such as affordability, brought about in part by a tech boom that Amazon helped fuel.

Wilson defeated Mayor Bruce Harrell, a more business friendly leader than Amazon was used to dealing with during the tech giant’s strained relations with City Hall.

“I’ve tried to have a very supportive relationship, but also one on mutual accountability,” Harrell told GeekWire in January about his dealings with Amazon. “I think it’s working out well.”

During her campaign in September, Wilson told GeekWire that she aims to work with the tech sector and Amazon on innovative solutions to civic challenges.

A longtime community organizer and Transit Riders Union co-founder, Wilson helped design and pass Seattle’s controversial JumpStart payroll expense tax in 2020. A majority of the revenue — $360 million in 2024 — is generated from 10 companies, including Amazon. 

“Obviously Amazon and the other big tech companies are very important players in our city and in our economy, and so I think it’s very important that the city has working relationships there,” she said.

In the same election that ushered in Wilson, voters also overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, a plan hatched by Harrell and City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck that will reshape the city’s business and occupation (B&O) tax that applies to gross revenue. It will impact both small startups and large tech companies such as Amazon.

According to public records, Zapolsky gave $550 to Harrell’s re-election campaign. Amazon HR chief Beth Galetti ($650) and Amazon Stores CEO Doug Herrington ($550) are among others from Amazon who contributed.

During Tuesday’s event at The Spheres, Amazon spotlighted its philanthropic efforts and the progress being made across the region, including:

• $900 million committed through its Housing Fund to create or preserve more than 10,000 affordable homes.
• 4.5 million meals delivered to families in need since 2020.
• 380,000 bed nights provided through Mary’s Place to families experiencing homelessness.

Zapolsky said Amazon’s community strategy shifted as the company rapidly expanded in Seattle. He said employees and leaders have always cared about their community, but the company’s efforts were informal and relatively small-scale in its earlier days. By 2009 and 2010, Amazon had grown far faster than expected and “we were sort of backing into the scale that we have in the city,” Zapolsky said — prompting company leaders to recognize the need for a more organized approach.

From there, he said, Amazon began applying its core business principles to civic work: taking a long-term view, listening to partners to understand what the community actually needs, and focusing on where Amazon’s unique capabilities — logistics, technology, legal expertise — could make the biggest impact, rather than just financial contributions.

“We’re still in the middle of the journey,” Zapolsky said.

Amazon counts more than 80,000 full- and part-time employees in the Puget Sound region. About 50,000 corporate and tech workers are in Seattle— a number that shrunk from about 60,000 in 2020 as more jobs shifted to Bellevue. The company cut 14,000 workers in broad layoffs in October, with 2,303 corporate employees in Washington state.

Zapolsky, who has been at Amazon 26 years, called his move from New York to Seattle 32 years ago the best decision he ever made. He cited the city’s amazing assets, from its people and diversity to its infrastructure improvements including the waterfront, convention center, and Climate Pledge Arena.

“Even government when it tries can’t screw this up,” he said, adding, again, “We’re here to stay. We want to continue working with our partners in the community, continue making the Puget Sound region better for our community and for our employees.”

Cameras that automatically capture images of vehicle license plates are being turned off by police in jurisdictions across Washington state, in part after a court ruled the public has a right to access data generated by the technology.

Police in Stanwood and Sedro-Woolley turned off their cameras before the Nov. 6 ruling in Skagit County Superior Court, and Redmond, Lynnwood and Skamania County turned off their cameras after the ruling, according to a report in The Seattle Times on Tuesday.

The debate stems from the use of Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) made by Flock Safety, and whether the images and data collected by the cameras are subject to release under Washington’s Public Records Act.

According to court records and the Times, Jose Rodriguez, a tattoo artist who works in Walla Walla, filed public records requests for the ALPR photos and data of about 50 public agencies across Washington.

“The government can’t just put a tracker on us without a warrant, but these (cameras) are basically doing the same thing,” Rodriguez told the Times. He sued 10 cities, including Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood, that didn’t provide their images and data after his public records requests.

“The Flock images generated by the Flock cameras … are public records,” Judge Elizabeth Neidzwski wrote in her ruling, adding that the images are “created and used to further a governmental purpose” and were paid for and generated for the benefit of the cities fighting not to release the data.

ALPR cameras are intended as a public safety tool, to automatically alert officers and analysts when a vehicle linked to a crime, missing person, stolen vehicle, or other critical incident is detected.

The cameras do not use facial recognition or random surveillance, and images and data are supposed to be deleted from Flock’s cloud-based storage system within 30 days.

Flock Safety told the Times that privacy concerns about its technology are unjustified, and that the company’s cameras take pictures of vehicles on public roads, where there is no expectation of privacy. The company said it is advocating a “legislative fix” to Washington’s Public Records Act.

Privacy advocates argue that the technology could be used for mass surveillance. Researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights reported last month that 18 Washington police agencies had their Flock Safety databases searched this year by the U.S. Border Patrol. The state’s “Keep Washington Working Act” bars most state agencies from cooperating with immigration enforcement.

The Redmond Police Dept. started deploying ALPR cameras this summer but turned them off earlier this month after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested seven people, and raised concerns that ICE had accessed the city’s Flock data.

In another incident, a Redmond man was detained when police acted on an alert generated by a Flock camera. KING 5 reported that the system wrongly flagged the man’s car as being “associated” with his son, who shares his name and was wanted on a felony warrant.

The Ballmer Group Philanthropy has pledged up to $170 million per year over the next decade — likely more than $1 billion in total — to significantly increase preschool access for low-income families in Washington.

The state’s 40-year-old Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) currently serves more than 14,000 students. With the new funding, it will add about 10,000 additional seats, starting with 2,000 new spots next year.

Representatives with the Ballmer Group, created by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie Ballmer, announced the gift today alongside Gov. Bob Ferguson, lawmakers and educators.

In order to use the funding, the state cannot reduce the number of state-funded ECEAP seats.

The support comes as Washington is facing budget shortfalls and the Trump administration has previously withheld funding for Head Start and could spike the preschool program.

“The Ballmer Group’s investment sets up an innovative public-private partnership, and will transform the lives of thousands of little Washingtonians and their families,” Ferguson said.

The philanthropy previously gave $43 million in 2023 to support early childhood education in Washington.

Ballmer, who led Microsoft from 2000 to 2014, has a net worth of $154.2 billion, according to Forbes. He remains the tech giant’s largest shareholder.

Voters in Seattle have overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, which will reshape the city’s business and occupation (B&O) tax that applies to gross revenue. It will impact both small startups and large tech companies such as Amazon.

The ballot measure garnered a 67.7% approval in King County’s unofficial election results posted Tuesday evening.

The initiative will temporarily eliminate B&O taxes for small- and medium-sized businesses — including tech startups — with gross receipts of $2 million or less.

To offset the revenue loss for the city, large companies would see their B&O tax rate increase by more than 50% — from 0.427% to 0.65% for service businesses. Only revenue above $2 million will be taxed.

The new tax rules is expected to raise an additional $81 million per year for human services and other city programs.

The city, which is trying to address a substantial budget shortfall over the next two years, says about 90% of small- and medium-sized businesses in Seattle will pay fewer B&O taxes if the proposal passes.

Smaller companies and those just getting off the ground would no longer pay B&O taxes, potentially saving them thousands of dollars per year. A services company with $1 million in revenue pays $4,270 in B&O tax annually at the current rate.

The tax change adds another wrinkle to the dynamic between Amazon — Seattle’s largest employer — and city lawmakers, following years of a strained relationship over tax policy.

GeekWire has reached out to Amazon for comment on the new B&O tax.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck unveiled the proposal in June, framing it as a way to protect Seattle’s small businesses while shielding from potential federal funding cuts. They have also cited the city’s gaping budget deficit.

Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association, called it “a boneheaded proposal of epic proportions” in a post on LinkedIn in June. Scholes supported exempting small businesses from the B&O tax. But he said raising taxes on larger companies “will ultimately result in Seattle defunding its tax base.”

Previously: Bold or boneheaded? Seattle’s proposed tax hike on big business draws fire as Amazon stays silent

The City of Seattle is interviewing candidates for a City AI Officer position to lead how artificial intelligence is utilized across departments and offices.

The new job is in line with the city’s recent release of a “responsible AI plan,” which provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.

The CAIO will report to Rob Lloyd, the city’s chief technology officer, who said the job posting attracted 3,000 visits in the first week it was live. From roughly 40 highly qualified applicants, nine are being invited to interview, with backgrounds ranging from the private sector, federal government and academia.

Lloyd, who started as CTO last year, said the “very competitive” applicant pool also includes a few ex-Microsoft employees. A hire should be made by next week.

“We created the city AI plan [because] there’s lots of things that happen with AI for an organization to be effective at it,” Lloyd told GeekWire. “We defined a couple domains of activity that we have to be successful at.”

The CAIO will manage those domains, including:

• Technical excellence and orchestration: The city’s AI plan ensures that infrastructure, programming, data, and process engineering are aligned under a coordinated strategy. Lloyd said success depends on an “elite-level AI expert” to oversee frameworks, technology, and training.
• Learning, skilling, and responsible adoption: With 39 departments, the city must build a shared understanding of AI use. The focus is on preventing “AI product sprawl” and aligning solutions with city priorities — such as budget directives and executive orders—while improving AI literacy, consistent terminology, and awareness of AI’s impact on workflows and people.
• Partnerships and community activation: The plan connects internal AI efforts with academia, startups, and local organizations to strengthen Seattle’s AI ecosystem. By fostering collaboration and shared understanding around AI safety and innovation, the city enhances both its capabilities and its role as a responsible community partner, Lloyd said.

The use of AI has the ability to reshape how numerous city departments do their work and serve residents. Lloyd pointed to adoption already under way in the Seattle Department of Transportation, where AI and game theory are being used to analyze areas with higher accident rates and find patterns and anomalies in reports and help accelerate design options so safe intersections can be engineered.

Public utilities, public safety and permitting are also ripe for AI disruption, Lloyd said, but the approach is to augment human workers, not automate and displace them.

“There is plenty of space we can look at where staff are overwhelmed,” he said. “We’re not getting to the response level that we aspire to, and there’s areas where we want to make decisions even smarter, even faster. We can take AI and focus on those things, not to displace jobs, but to get to the service levels and decision making that we want to create.”

Seattle has been a leader in creating guidance for AI use, and claims to be the first in the nation to issue a generative AI policy in the fall of 2023. The city has policies requiring “human-in-the-loop” oversight, where employees must review generative AI outputs before official use and attribute any AI-assisted work to the specific technology.

When it comes to the new AI officer and the AI plan, Lloyd stressed the importance of “making sure that we focus on our values and how we apply AI in the organization and the community.”

The annual salary for the CAIO role is between $125,000 and $188,000, according to the job posting.

Whoever comes away with the job will join a city government that is willing and able to work with a number of local “assets,” as Lloyd called them, including the University of Washington, AI House, Ai2, Plug & Play, and more.

“We are the second biggest epicenter of AI talent,” he said. “It would be a really sad thing if we did not take advantage of that opportunity and play to that strength.”

Neil Kumar has been known to leave a water bottle or a jacket at school or the gym, marking himself among the millions of Americans whose forgotten belongings end up in a lost-and-found box or a landfill every year.

Now Kumar is the founder of FindIt, an app designed to provide an AI-powered solution to recovering what’s been lost.

The 15-year-old freshman at Bellevue (Wash.) High School was recently selected as one of four innovators to participate in the city’s Civic Innovation Challenge, an initiative seeking technology solutions to municipal challenges.

FindIt will be used on a pilot basis at Bellevue College to test the app’s usability and effectiveness among students, staff and visitors and evaluate its potential for broader deployment.

“I’ve always been interested in how technology can solve our real world problems,” Kumar told GeekWire.

According to statistics cited by the website Lostings, over 400 million items are lost and found every year in the U.S. The estimated value of lost items is over $5 billion per year.

Kumar wants his creation to help address the economic aspect of all of that loss, and also the sustainability concern. His tagline is “Buy less, lose even less.”

Available on iOS, FindIt works when someone in charge of a lost-and-found system, at a school for instance, takes a photo of a recovered item and uploads that photo. The image is processed by artificial intelligence, which generates a description, such as “blue water bottle with red sticker and white top.”

A student looking for a lost item types a description into FindIt, and the app’s AI scans uploaded listings to find the best matches.

Kumar said the easy process of searching via a mobile app eclipses traditional systems that require a person to physically return to a place where they may have left something.

He started working on the project a year ago and FindIt was among 23 competitive applicants reviewed and judged in the civic challenge. The three other companies and ideas that were accepted are:

• Certivo, a Seattle company with an AI-driven platform that provides visibility into vendor compliance across procurement and cybersecurity.
• Legislaide, a Denver company using AI to analyze municipal codes, legislative history and state statutes, allowing staff to run plain English searches across agendas, minutes, ordinances, resolutions, reports and more.
• Juganu, an Israeli company with a smart lighting solution to illuminate curbside activity while monitoring real-time usage patterns to support city and Bellevue College transportation and public safety initiatives.

FindIt was also selected for the Thermo Fisher Junior Innovators Challenge, and Kumar said he was recognized in the top 300 junior innovators in the U.S. this year. 

The app is currently deployed at Odle Middle School in Bellevue. Kumar envisions the tool someday being available to more schools as well as airports, workplaces, public transit agencies and elsewhere.

Kumar, who has worked with Sustainability Ambassadors, a program that helps develop student leadership skills, thinks FindIt is just the start, and he’d like to be an entrepreneur in the future.

“I like to solve problems using technology, and help people using those solutions,” he said.

Leaders in the Pacific Northwest are largely bullish on the region’s continued economic success — but one threat to the region’s fiscal progress worries them in particular.

“What always strikes me, whether I’m in City Hall in Vancouver or Seattle or Portland, is that everybody talks about the same thing — the high cost of housing,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith at this week’s Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle.

“It’s become an enormous barrier, not just for attracting new talent, but for enabling teachers and police officers and nurses and firefighters to live in the communities in which they serve,” he added.

Dr. Tom Lynch, president and director of Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center, was more succinct.

“My people can’t find places to live,” Lynch said during a Tuesday panel at the same event.

Those concerns are bolstered by research in a new report on the economic viability of the corridor running from Vancouver, B.C., through Seattle to Portland.

Housing costs were cited as one of the top threats to the region’s success, noting that Vancouver’s housing-cost-to-income-ratio disparity is among the worst in the world, while in Seattle median home prices relative to wages have doubled in the past 15 years. Portland reports a net out-migration as workers move to more affordable areas.

Other concerns include rising business costs and regulations, declining numbers of skilled workers and new restrictions on foreign talent immigrating to the U.S., and clean energy shortages.

“We’ve got to find ways to be able to increase the density of our housing, come up with creative solutions for allowing more families to be able to live close to where the jobs are,” Lynch said.

Smith agreed, adding, “The only way to dig ourselves out of this is to harness the power of the market through public-private partnerships, to recognize that zoning and permitting needs to be put to work to accelerate investment.”

Area tech giants have been pursuing those partnerships to tackle the challenge.

In 2019, Microsoft pledged $750 million to boost the affordable housing inventory and has helped build or retain 12,000 units in the region. Amazon in recent years has committed $3.4 billion for housing across three hubs nationally where it has large operations. The company in September celebrated a milestone of building or preserving 10,000 units in the Seattle area.

Despite the efforts, Smith said the shortage keeps worsening and in 2025, new construction starts are expected to be the lowest since before the Great Recession.

The city of Seattle, for one, is looking to sweeten a property-tax exemption deal for developers that could encourage construction and it’s also applying AI to permitting process in an effort to speed up projects.

Smith also promoted the long-held vision of a high-speed rail line in the Pacific Northwest that would make commutes much faster between growing urban hubs. But a panel Wednesday cautioned that dream is still many years out.

Ten years into a dream to connect Vancouver, B.C., Seattle and Portland via a high-speed rail line, stakeholders and backers of the mega-project said Wednesday that they’re still very much onboard — and to prepare for a long trip.

With a lengthy and uncertain timeline ahead, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, a speaker at the Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle, cautioned many of those in attendance that they likely won’t live long enough to see high-speed rail in the Pacific Northwest.

“When you build big things, they cost big money,” LaHood said. “It took us 50 years to build the interstate system.”

LaHood said the key is to “get on board” now so that “our children and grandchildren” will reap the benefits.

At Cascadia Innovation Corridor’s annual event this week, much of the focus was on how to strengthen the cross-border partnership between three growing cities and numerous locales in between. Leaders discussed ideas around innovation, housing affordability, sustainability, and economic development. They signed a Memorandum of Reaffirmation to solidify commitments.

And Wednesday was about the enhanced transportation connectivity that could help drive it all, and the work that lies ahead in building a coalition of public and political support across the region, securing funding, jumpstarting planning, and more. Even producing videos like the new one below is part of the massive outreach under way.

Former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, Cascadia Innovation Corridor’s chair, said that a decade ago, high-speed rail was just an idea. The next decade can be a defining one.

“You would have thought we were thinking of doing something in outer space by the reaction,” she said. “Today, it is much more than an idea, and we are actually moving forward. While we do have a long way to go, as you well know, we’re funding the first phase of planning built on one of the most unique coalitions in North America.”

Envisioning a mega-region akin to Silicon Valley, in which Vancouver, Seattle and Portland are each only an hour apart, Gregoire highlighted the possibilities that could come with high-speed mobility.

“A UW student can intern in Vancouver, a family in Puget Sound can explore a job in Portland, and a cancer researcher in Vancouver can get home for dinner after a shift in Seattle,” she said. “It’s a new way of living, working and connecting, one that expands what’s possible for everyone who calls Cascadia home.”

The pace to make the dream a reality has been anything but high-speed.

In 2017, Microsoft — which has an office in downtown Vancouver — gave $50,000 to a $300,000 effort led by Washington state to study a high-speed train proposal. In 2021, officials from Washington, Oregon and British Columbia signed a memorandum of understanding to form a committee to coordinate the plan.

Last year, the Federal Railroad Administration awarded the Washington State Department of Transportation $49.7 million to develop a service development plan for Cascadia High-Speed Rail. A timeline on WSDOT’s website points to 2028 for estimated completion of that plan, and for 2029 and beyond it simply says, “future phases to be determined.”

Cascadia is not alone in its quest for high-speed rail.

LaHood, a Republican cabinet member in the Obama administration, recalled the former president’s commitment to rail transportation. He said the Trump administration “clawing back” $4 billion in funding for California’s high-speed rail project between San Francisco and Los Angeles should not be considered a “death knell,” despite challenges in that state.

LaHood pointed to Brightline train projects in Florida, connecting Orlando and Miami, and Las Vegas, with a plan to offer high-speed connectivity to Southern California. Another plan in Texas would connect Houston and Dallas. All are evidence, he said, that this mode of transportation is what Americans want in order to avoid clogged highways and airports.

“Once the politicians catch on to what the people want, boom, you get the kind of rail transportation that people are clamoring for,” LaHood said.

Here are highlights from other speakers at the conference on Wednesday:

• WSDOT Secretary Julie Meredith pointed to big Seattle transportation infrastructure projects that transformed the city, including the removal of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and construction of the SR 99 waterfront tunnel, as well as the new SR 520 floating bridge. Even as work will continue for years connecting communities via Link light rail, Meredith said, “I so often describe this program as one I’m most excited about, because it’s an opportunity for us to so fundamentally transform our region up and down the I-5 corridor,” Meredith said.
• Chelsea Levy, Cascadia High-Speed Rail project manager, said the region can expect a 25% increase in population, or about 3.4 million more people, by 2050. “This pace and magnitude of growth really requires us to act,” Levy said. Among other things, WSDOT will need to integrate with B.C. and Oregon transportation networks and, Levy stressed, the scale and complexity of the project will require a streamlining of permitting processes across the 345-mile mega-region.
• Hana Doubrava, a Vancouver-based corporate affairs director at Microsoft, leads the Cascadia initiative for the tech giant. She said the company’s support is not just symbolic, and that Microsoft believes modern, efficient transit and transportation options are essential for improved quality of life. “Cascadia is all about partnerships and relationships — despite the current geopolitics or baseball scores,” she said in a nod to Canada’s team, the Toronto Blue Jays, denying the Seattle Mariners a trip to the World Series.

Related:

• Microsoft’s Brad Smith makes nuanced AI pitch: Huge potential, real concerns, and a Jon Stewart clip
• Longterm vision for Seattle-Portland-Vancouver mega-region will require a ‘consensus on growth’
• Study: High-speed rail connecting Seattle to Vancouver BC would spur $355B in economic growth

It’s rare for a tech executive to cue up a video mocking themselves — but that’s just what Microsoft President Brad Smith did on Tuesday at the Cascadia Innovation Corridor conference in Seattle. Smith played a clip from The Daily Show in which comedian Jon Stewart lampooned his and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s interviews about AI’s impact on jobs.

The segment poked fun at the idea that displaced workers might become “prompt engineers” — a new job Stewart rebranded as “types questions guy.”

It was a self-aware feature of a talk that balanced enthusiasm for artificial intelligence’s potential with sober reflections on its hype and potential pitfalls.

The Microsoft leader called AI the “next great general purpose technology” on par with electricity. He said AI will transform sectors including health, education, biotech, aerospace, agriculture, climate and others.

That was a theme during Tuesday’s event. Former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, who leads the Cascadia Innovation Corridor group, kicked off the day by calling AI “a defining technology of our generation.”

Smith, who in his three decades at Microsoft has witnessed tech bubbles and bursts, also offered a “breadth of perspective” on AI that he hinted might be lacking in Silicon Valley.

“In so many ways, the sky is the limit,” Smith said. “That is exciting, but I don’t want to just be another tech bro who says, ‘Hey, great, here it comes. Get ready, get out your wallet.'”

AI-driven employment threats are becoming increasingly real in the tech sector and beyond. Amazon on Tuesday announced a huge round of layoffs, slashing 14,000 corporate and tech jobs. Earlier this year Microsoft laid off 15,000 employees worldwide. The cuts aren’t all tied to AI, but many executives are talking about worker efficiency gains thanks to the tech.

Despite the recent layoffs, many industry and elected leaders in the Cascadia region, which stretches from Vancouver, B.C., through Seattle and down to Portland, see AI as a promising economic engine that can build on the area’s strong tech foundation. That includes Microsoft and Amazon as well as a growing slate of AI startups, plus institutions such as the University of Washington, University of British Columbia, Allen Institute for AI and others.

But Smith — who manages to strike a persona blending tech evangelist, politician and favorite uncle — also acknowledged concerns about disparities in AI access, whether looking locally at rural versus urban divides, or the gap between AI use in affluent and low-income countries that lack widespread electricity and internet connections.

He also tackled the meta questions around the responsible use of AI and encouraged society to get out in front of the technology with appropriate guardrails.

“What are we trying to do as an industry, as a region, as a planet, as a species? Are we trying to build machines that are better than people? Are we trying to build machines that will help people become smarter and better?” he asked.

“If the experience that we’ve all had with social media over the last 15 years teaches us anything at all,” Smith continued, “it is that the best time to ask these questions and to debate them is before technology answers them for us.”

RELATED: Cascadia’s AI paradox: A world-leading opportunity threatened by rising costs and a talent crunch

Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson is threading the needle when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Ferguson made a brief appearance at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week on Monday evening, speaking at AI House on Pier 70 about his approach to governing the consequential technology.

“I view my job as maximizing the benefits and minimizing harms,” said Ferguson, who took office earlier this year.

Ferguson called AI one of the “top five biggest challenges” he thinks about daily, both professionally and personally.

In a follow-up interview with GeekWire, the governor said AI “could totally transform our government, as well as the private sector, in many ways.”

His comments came just as Amazon, the largest employer in Washington state, said it would eliminate about 14,000 corporate jobs, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence.

Ferguson told the crowd that the future of work and “loss of jobs that come with the technology” is on his mind.

The governor highlighted Washington’s AI Task Force, created during his tenure as attorney general, which is studying issues from algorithmic bias to data security. The group’s next set of recommendations arrives later this year and could shape upcoming legislation, he said.

States are moving ahead with their own AI rules in the absence of a comprehensive federal framework. Washington appears to sit in the pragmatic middle of this fast-moving regulatory landscape — using executive action and an expert task force to build guidelines, while watching experiments in states such as California and Colorado.

Seattle city leaders are also getting involved. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell last month announced a “responsible AI plan” that provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.

Ferguson said he’s aware of how AI can “really revolutionize our economy and state in so many ways,” from healthcare to education to wildfire detection.

But he also flagged his concerns — both as a policymaker and parent. The governor, who has 17-year-old twins, said he worries about the technology’s impact on young people, referencing reports of teen suicides linked to AI chatbots.

Despite those concerns, Ferguson maintained an upbeat tone during his remarks at Seattle AI Week, citing the region’s technical talent and economic opportunity from the technology.

He noted that the state, amid a $16 billion budget shortfall this year, kept $300,000 in funding for the AI House, the new waterfront startup hub that hosted Monday’s event.

“There is no better place anywhere in the United States for this innovation than right here in the Northwest,” he said.

Related: A tale of two Seattles in the age of AI: Harsh realities and new hope for the tech community

A new report exploring the potential for the Pacific Northwest to stake its claim as the global leader in responsible AI offers a paradoxical view. The Cascadia region, which includes Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, B.C., is described as a proven, promising player in the sphere — but with significant risks that threaten its success.

“We created companies that transformed global commerce,” writes former Gov. Chris Gregoire in a forward to the document. “Now we have the chance to add another chapter — one where Cascadia becomes the world’s standard-bearer for innovation that uplifts both people and planet.”

The Cascadia Innovation Corridor, which Gregoire chairs, released the report this morning as it kicks off its two-day conference. The economic advocacy group’s eighth annual event is being held in Seattle.

The study is built on an analysis by the Boston Consulting Group that ranks Cascadia’s three metro areas against 15 comparable regions in the U.S. and Canada for their economic competitiveness, including livability, workforce, and business and innovation climate. Seattle came in fourth behind Boston, Austin and Raleigh, while Portland ranked 13th and Vancouver 14th.

Over the past decade, the region’s gross domestic product and populations have both grown significantly, and when combined, their economies approach the 18th largest in the world.

Cascadia’s strengths, the report explains, include tech engines such as cloud giants Microsoft and Amazon in Washington, silicon chip manufacturing in Oregon, and quantum innovation in Vancouver, as well as academic excellence from the University of Washington, University of British Columbia and Oregon State University.

But as time goes on and as business and civic leaders aim for the prize of AI dominance, cracks in the system are increasingly troubling.

• Business costs are rising and there are mounting regulatory concerns — but it’s a tricky picture. Seattle, for example, often turns to B&O and headcount taxes to cover costs, while the state struggles to balance budgets in the absence of an income tax.
• Housing affordability is continuing to decline for many residents in these metro areas.
• Skilled tech workers are leaving Portland, in particular, and Seattle relies heavily on foreign workers receiving H1-B visas, which are less certain under the Trump administration.
• The clean, affordable energy that was once abundant in the Pacific Northwest is decreasingly available as droughts reduce river flows that drive hydropower dams and electricity demand increases with rapid data center growth.

The report notes that multiple regions around the U.S. and Canada have created AI-focused hubs with hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funding to bolster their hold on the sector.

New Jersey has a half-billion dollar “AI Moonshot” program including tax incentives and public-worker AI training programs; New York’s “Empire AI Consortium” has an AI computing training center at the University of Buffalo and startup supports; and California has a public-private task force to increase AI adoption within government services and connecting tech leaders with state agencies.

For its part, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced a “responsible AI plan” this fall that provides guidelines for the municipality’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver, which includes the earlier launches of the startup-focused AI House and Foundations.

But what the region really needs to succeed is a collaborative effort tapping all of the metro areas’ assets.

“For Cascadia, the lesson is clear: without a coordinated strategy that links our strengths in cloud computing, semiconductors, and research, we risk falling behind,” states the Cascadia Innovation Corridor report. “Acting together, we can position Cascadia not just to keep pace, but to lead.”

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has a message for his city’s tech giants: it’s time to reinvest in the community.

Harrell, speaking at an event Wednesday hosted by the Fremont Chamber of Commerce, said Seattle’s large companies have a “moral obligation to give back.”

The mayor specifically called out Microsoft and Amazon, citing their annual profits. “Microsoft … they made $88 billion last year … they have an obligation to give back to society, as does Amazon,” he said.

Harrell also described Seattle as a “city of innovation,” and one that has become a “great launching pad and fertile grounds for large companies.”

“That’s a good thing,” he said. “That’s not a bad thing.”

His comments reflect a delicate balance faced by Harrell and other city leaders — ensuring that Seattle’s global tech corporations continue to bolster the economy and tax base, while addressing the ripple effects on housing, transportation, and communities.

Harrell has delivered a similar message since taking office in 2022.

“What I’ve tried to do as mayor is to say, without ambiguity, that we value their jobs,” he said of Amazon, Seattle’s largest employer, in an interview with GeekWire earlier this year. “We also believe in a culture of accountability.”

During an appearance at the GeekWire Summit in 2022, Harrell urged the business and tech industry to get more involved in civic life to help make improvements in the city.

“There’s just plenty of opportunities for you all to engage,” he said, “and I’m just a call away to facilitate that engagement.”

Harrell, a former attorney in the telecom industry, is seeking re-election next month. He’s facing off against Katie Wilson, a progressive community organizer who won nearly 51% of the vote in the August primary.

The race is drawing national attention, in part due to the contrasting profiles and campaigns between the incumbent and challenger.

Wilson was inspired to run after Seattle voters earlier this year approved a measure creating a publicly funded social housing developer, financed by a 5% tax on salaries above $1 million paid to employees working in the city.

Harrell supported an alternative funding mechanism for social housing in Seattle. The proposed ordinance received financial support from Amazon and Microsoft.

The debate over who should pay for city services — and how much — underscores a broader tension between Seattle’s progressive tax ambitions and its reliance on the tech industry’s prosperity.

Harrell briefly spoke about taxes during Wednesday’s event, noting how the city “lost 10,000 jobs from Amazon” following years of friction over tax policy in Seattle. “That’s not a sustainable strategy, just to tax people,” he said.

However, Harrell earlier this year supported a proposal that would shield smaller companies from paying Seattle’s business & occupation tax — while increasing rates for larger companies.

Harrell was city council president in 2018 when lawmakers approved — and then repealed — a controversial per-employee “head tax” on big businesses. The council in 2020 later passed the “JumpStart” payroll tax, which Wilson helped craft.

Speaking to GeekWire last month, Wilson — whose platform is focused on raising more revenue “from the wealthiest corporations” — said she aims to have a working relationship with Amazon and other tech companies, calling them “very important players in our city and our economy.”

While tech dominates the Seattle economy, Wilson is interested in diversifying that focus. In a recent post on Reddit, she cautioned that a heavy reliance on the tech sector could pose problems for Seattle down the road.

“We’ve really been blithely riding the tech wave for the past 15 years and I don’t think we can just assume that will continue,” she wrote.

At the event Wednesday, Harrell also discussed public safety and the city’s new high-tech operations center designed to help officers fight crime in real time.

The Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) pulls live footage and data from surveillance cameras and other sources into a centralized command room staffed by analysts up to 20 hours a day.

Critics, including Wilson, have raised concerns about the federal government using surveillance footage to target immigrants.

Seattle Police Department Captain James Britt said earlier this year that data requests from outside agencies — including federal law enforcement — are screened and must comply with state and local laws. “We control where all of our data goes,” Britt said at a press event in July touting the RTCC.

Harrell reiterated the point on Wednesday, saying that third parties cannot obtain footage. He also noted other cities that have similar systems in place.

“We have actually caught criminals because of the technology,” he said.

Harrell last month announced a “responsible AI plan” that provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.