Flock's CEO says the backlash shouldn't pause the cameras
Flock's chief executive went on stage with a protest outside the door and said the quiet part about surveillance accountability: his company has never cut off a customer. A few blocks away from that panel, OpenAI's trade-secrets fight with Apple produced an injunction and a counter-allegation on the same afternoon.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley used his TechCrunch Disrupt panel in San Francisco on Wednesday to argue that privacy trade-offs are the price of a safer society — and to admit his company has never dropped a law-enforcement customer over abuse. "If a customer knowingly broke the law, we would fire them immediately. That's very easy," Langley told TechCrunch editor-in-chief Connie Loizos. "Most of the debate is nuanced into 'what if two officers out of fifty were caught?' Today, we haven't fired any customers, but it's not off the table in the case of some pretty drastic law-abiding issue." Pressed on how abuse should be curbed, he offered no mechanism: "I think there's a way to do that that doesn't disrupt the legal system," he said, without naming one. On stage he leaned on anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs; his line for the All-In podcast last month was that the backlash had mostly damaged "internal morale."
Why it matters: the customer-abuse record is now the company's own benchmark, and it is public. Flock's license-plate network spans roughly 120,000 cameras across 49 states and reaches more than 4,800 agencies, and the reporting on misuse is a list of arrests and resignations — officers accused of tracking former partners and colleagues, an Atlanta suburb sharing camera data with more than 2,000 outside organizations, and a department that logged "hehehe" as its justification twenty times. Florida banned automated plate readers from state highways in September, and a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 38% of Americans support Flock cameras in their community against 47% who oppose them. Langley also said there is no sale coming, after reporting that cities have been replacing Flock with Axon: "No, we've no desire to sell the company."
The scene outside the Moscone Center was the counterargument. Demonstrators wore the red robes of The Handmaid's Tale, carried cardboard replicas of Flock cameras and signs reading "Flock off" and "Flock = ICE," with clips from 1984 playing over a loudspeaker. Organizer Ashley Ortiz, of the activist group The Wolves, framed the coalition as bipartisan — "we can come together around something as bipartisan as not enjoying mass surveillance" — and put the question back to Langley: "What about AI-powered mass surveillance should be making us feel safe?" We covered the company paying its own way down in September — Flock offers buyouts to its 1,500 staff as cities drop its cameras.
A federal judge told both sides of the Apple-OpenAI trade secrets case where he is leaning, and OpenAI agreed to the terms before he had to order them. At a hearing Wednesday in San Jose, Judge Edward Davila said he was "highly likely" to grant Apple's preliminary injunction barring OpenAI from using material Apple claims was stolen, according to Bloomberg, and OpenAI then agreed not to use the disputed trade secrets while the case proceeds and to collect forensic images of devices belonging to 14 employees who may hold Apple's confidential information. Davila still called a full sweep of devices and repositories a "huge ask," and Apple's attorney John Desmarais narrowed the request to a small group of former employees — "a few bad apples and we know who they are."
The same day, OpenAI filed its own counter-allegation: that an employee who left for Apple sent more than 100 files about an unreleased device to a personal account and then presented the material to Apple leadership, including images of an unreleased product, engineering data and supplier information. OpenAI ties that presentation to Apple's new HomeView display and home accessories lineup; Apple says it searched for the one file OpenAI identified and found nothing on its systems. What the week has produced is a symmetry problem — two companies accusing each other of the same leak path while a judge sets the rules for discovery.
The founders of Ricursive Intelligence told Disrupt that AI-designed chips are the way out of the compute squeeze, and put a number on the squeeze: at least 10,000x more demand for compute within five years. Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini said their startup designs chips with AI that learns from each iteration, optimizing whole dies rather than partitioning them into dozens of blocks — an approach their earlier AlphaChip work pushed to an unconventional "donut" component layout that performed better than the conventional arrangement. Their pitch is that if a chip can be designed in about a week instead of a year, custom silicon becomes economic for markets that can't justify it today, from space to AR. The claim is unverified and self-reported; what is on the record is the fundraising — a $300 million Series A led by Lightspeed at a $4 billion post-money valuation in January, with Nvidia's venture arm among the investors, for $335 million raised in four months.
What to watch: whether Flock publishes the audit and case-code enforcement it promised by year end, and whether Davila's injunction lands in writing with the scope Apple asked for or the narrower one he hinted at.
If a company's own abuse record is public, should that disqualify it from the next contract — or is the record just the cost of the coverage? Tell us in the comments.
