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Amazon and consultants for the company violated federal labor law by interrogating and threatening employees regarding their union activities, and racially disparaging organizers who were seeking to unionize a Staten Island warehouse, a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled.

The NLRB said Friday that Administrative Law Judge Lauren Esposito found Amazon “committed multiple violations” of federal labor law at its largest warehouse in New York, called JFK8, between May and October 2021, a period that saw an increase in organizing activity.

In April 2022, employees voted to join the Amazon Labor Union, a grassroots group of current and former workers, becoming the first unionized Amazon facility in the U.S. Since that victory, the group has been fighting to reach a contract with Amazon. 

The judge in New York heard testimony from Amazon employees, managers and labor consultants in virtual hearings that went on for almost a year. Esposito determined Amazon illegally confiscated organizing pamphlets from employees that were being distributed in on-site breakrooms and conducted surveillance of employees’ organizing activities.

Amazon also violated labor laws when it sent an employee at a neighboring facility to JFK8 home early from his shift and changed his work assignments in retaliation for supporting the union, the judge found. The employee, Daequan Smith, sorted packages at a delivery station called DYY6, down the street from JFK8.

Additionally, the judge found that Amazon broke the law when a “union avoidance” consultant, Bradley Moss, who was hired by the company, threatened employees, telling them it would be “futile” to vote to join the ALU. Amazon and other companies often hire labor consultants like Moss, referred to as “persuaders,” to dissuade workers from unionizing. The company spent $14 million on anti-union consultants in 2022, the Huffington Post reported in March, citing disclosure forms filed with the Department of Labor.

As a result of the ruling, Amazon will be required to post notices reminding workers of their rights at its JFK8 and DYY6 facilities. The company also has to make Smith “whole for any loss of earnings and other benefits,” the NLRB said.

In one exchange with a JFK8 employee, Natalie Monarrez, Moss discussed the union campaign at another Amazon facility, BHM1, in Bessemer, Alabama. Monarrez said Moss told her the Bessemer campaign was “not a serious union drive,” but a “Black Lives Matter protest about social injustice.”

“Moss then pointed to the front of the JFK8 warehouse and said, ‘Just like these guys out here, they’re just a bunch of thugs,'” Esposito wrote in her judgment, citing testimony from Monarrez.

Moss and representatives from Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Employees at BHM1 voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in April 2021, but the results of the election were tossed after the NLRB found Amazon improperly interfered in the vote. A do-over election was held last year, but the results remain too close to call.

Amazon’s labor record has been scrutinized heavily, especially as union organizing ramped up in its warehouse and delivery workforce during the Covid pandemic. The company faces 240 open or settled unfair labor practice charges across 26 states, according to the NLRB, concerning a range of allegations, including its conduct around union elections.

The company has also clashed with Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee and one of the leaders of ALU. A leaked memo obtained by Vice revealed David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel, had referred to Smalls, a Black man, as “not smart or articulate,” and recommended making him “the face” of efforts to organize workers.

Amazon continues to challenge the JFK8 election results, as well as the NLRB and the union’s conduct during the drive. The agency upheld the results of the election in January.

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in $2.4 billion licensing deal

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in .4 billion licensing deal

In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.

Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP

Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.

Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.

OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.

“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”

Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.

Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.

“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”

Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.

“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.

WATCH: Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

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Musk’s xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok’s ‘horrific’ antisemitic posts

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Musk's xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok's 'horrific' antisemitic posts

The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024. 

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.

xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.

“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.

X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.

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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.

“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.

Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”

xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.

Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.

CNBC’s April Roach contributed to this article.

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Meta removes 10 million Facebook profiles in effort to combat spam

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Meta removes 10 million Facebook profiles in effort to combat spam

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg looks on before the luncheon on the inauguration day of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second presidential term in Washington on Jan. 20, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Meta on Monday said it has removed about 10 million profiles for impersonating large content producers through the first half of 2025 as part of an effort by the company to combat “spammy content.”

The crackdown is part of Meta’s broader effort to make the Facebook feed more relevant and authentic by taking action against and removing accounts that engage in “spammy” behavior, such as content created using artificial intelligence tools.

As part of that initiative, Meta is also rolling out stricter measures to promote original posts from creators, the company said in a blog post.

Facebook also took action against approximately 500,000 accounts that it identified to be engaged in inauthentic behavior and spam. These actions included demoting comments and reducing distribution of content, which are intended to make it harder for these accounts to monetize their posts.

Meta said unoriginal content is when images or videos are reused without crediting the original creator. Meta said it now has technology that will detect duplicate videos and reduce the distribution of that content.

The action against spam and inauthentic content comes as Meta increases its investment in AI, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announcing plans to spend “hundreds of billions of dollars” on AI compute infrastructure to bring the company’s first supercluster online next year.

This mandate comes at a time when AI is making it easier to mass-produce content across social media platforms. Other platforms are also taking action to combat the increase of spammy, low-quality content on social media, also known as “AI slop.”

Google’s YouTube announced a change in policy this month that prevents content that is mass-produced or repetitive from being eligible for being awarded revenue.

This announcement sparked confusion on social media, with many users believing this was a reversal on YouTube’s stance on AI content. However, YouTube clarified that the policy change is aimed at curbing unoriginal, spammy and repetitive videos.

“We welcome creators using AI tools to enhance their storytelling, and channels that use AI in their content remain eligible to monetize,” said a spokesperson for YouTube in a blog post to clarify the new policy.

YouTube’s new policy change will take effect on Tuesday.

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