On Jan. 10, Apple filed its annual company proxy report for shareholders in advance of its shareholder meeting in February, and like Costco’s board of directors did earlier in January, they called for their shareholders to vote against a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research to end the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
According to Reuters, Apple is urging its shareholders to vote against the proposal from the NCPPR as well as three other outside proposals.
The proposal from the NCPPR makes a claim that DEI “poses litigation, reputational and financial risks to companies, and therefore financial risks to their shareholders, and therefore further risks to companies for not abiding by their fiduciary duties.”
Apple, however, strongly responded to these claims by asserting that shareholders should vote against their proposal.
“The proposal is unnecessary as Apple already has a well-established compliance program and the proposal inappropriately attempts to restrict Apple’s ability to manage its own ordinary business operations, people and teams, and business strategies,” Apple said.
Apple’s opposition to a call for the company to report on ethical AI data acquisition and usage, however, is more centered on the fact that the proposal is actually concerned with OpenAI and not Apple’s own proprietary Apple Intelligence system, per the company’s response.
According to Reuters, Apple routinely asks its shareholders to vote against external proposals, so the rejection of these calls which appear to be coming mostly from conservative activists based on the requests, is a common practice.
“The proposal does not raise any specific issues with Apple Intelligence, but instead focuses its criticisms on OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, an independent service that Apple users may choose to access, and inappropriately cites controversies related to other companies that do not involve Apple,” the company stated in response to the call for an ethical AI report.
In a recent interview with WIRED, Apple CEO Tim Cook indicated that user privacy and security within its AI structure is top of mind at the company.
“We’ll always consider the privacy implications. We don’t accept that there’s a trade-off between great privacy and great intelligence. Much of Apple Intelligence runs on the device, but for some users we need more powerful models. So we crafted private cloud compute that essentially has the same privacy and security as your device does. We just kept plugging at it until we came up with the right idea,” Cook, who recently made a personal doantion of $1 million to Trump’s upcoming inauguration, told the outlet.
Apple also opposes a report on costs and benefits of child sex abuse material-identifying software and user privacy and a report on charitable giving for similar reasons, in their recommendations for shareholders to vote against those reports, they cited the company’s commitment to protecting data and children, respective to each report.
Regarding the child abuse report Apple declared, “We believe that our current approach to child safety, which is informed by stakeholder engagement, is more appropriate than the universal surveillance suggested in the proposal, which could have serious implications for our users’ human and civil rights globally.”
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