Does everyone in Seattle hate AI?
That’s one of the surprising questions that arose this week in a viral response Blog post written by Jonathan is readyA former Microsoft engineer who recently left the tech giant for his own startup.
In the post, Reddy describes showing off his AI-powered mapping project, WonderfugleTo engineers around the world. From Tokyo to San Francisco, people are curious everywhere. In Seattle, “there was instant hostility the moment they heard ‘AI,'” he said.
“Bring AI into a Seattle coffee shop now and people react like you’re advocating for asbestos,” he wrote.
The culprit, Reidy argues, is Big Tech’s AI experience — specifically, Microsoft’s. Based on conversations with former colleagues and his own time at the company, he describes a workplace where AI became the only career-safe zone amid massive layoffs, and everyone was forced to use copilot tools that were often worse than working manually.
The result, Reddy says, is a kind of learned helplessness: Intelligent people believe that AI is meaningless and beyond their reach.
His post received hundreds of comments Hacker News and other feedback on LinkedIn. Some think he hits the nail on the head. Trey Causey, indeed former head of AI ethics, said He recalls volunteering the “AI” part of his job title in conversations with Seattle locals. He hypothesized that the city could be a hotbed of anti-AI sentiment among major US tech hubs.
But others say the piece paints with too broad a brush. Seattle technician Marcelo Calbucci arguing The divide is not geographic but cultural — between burned-out Big Tech employees and passionate founders. He pointed to layoffs that double workloads as AI demands increase, creating stress levels beyond simple burnout.
If you hang out with founders and investors in Seattle, the energy is completely different,” Calbucci wrote.
Seattle venture capitalist Chris DeVoe was more dismissive, calling Ready’s post is critical of what he sees as a combination of “clickbait-y” and the experiences of Big Tech individual contributors with Seattle’s startup ecosystem.
This ties in with GeekWire’s recent story about “A Tale of Two Seattles in the Age of AI”: A corporate town reeling from shell-big job cuts, and a startup town buzzing with excitement about new tools.
Ryan Brush, a director at Salesforce, offers an intriguing theory: Any anti-AI sentiment in Seattle can be traced back to the city’s “undercurrent of anti-authority thinking that goes way back,” from grunge music to WTO protests.
“Seattle has a long history of being skeptical of systems that concentrate power and extract it from individuals,” Brash said. Comment. “And what we see with AI today (the scale of data collection, how concentrated it is in a few large companies) may land differently here than elsewhere.”
Ready ends his post by concluding that Seattle still has world-class talent — but unlike San Francisco, it has lost the conviction that it can change the world.
In our story earlier this year –Can Seattle own the AI era?— We asked investors and founders to gauge the city’s startup ecosystem potential. Many community leaders expressed optimism, in part because of the concentration of engineering talent that is critical to building AI-native companies.
But, as we reported later, Seattle lacks the superstar AI startups that are easy to find in the Bay Area — despite being home to hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon, as well as world-class research institutions (University of Washington; Allen Institute for AI) and notable Silicon Valley outposts.
Is it because Seattle “hates AI”? It seems like a bit of a stretch. But this week’s discussion is certainly another reminder of the evolving interplay between Seattle’s tech corporations, talent and startup activity in the AI age.
Related: Seattle is poised for the impact of massive AI innovation — but could use a more entrepreneurial vibe
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/viral-rant-on-why-everyone-in-seattle-hates-ai-strikes-a-nerve-sparks-debate-over-citys-tech-vibe/