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Forbes has published an investigation into Amazon’s efforts to court law enforcement clients for artificial intelligence and surveillance services. The article reveals that not only is the company promoting Amazon Web Services as a potential police tool, but it has been partnering with other businesses in that sector to use its cloud infrastructure. According to the Forbes report, Amazon’s partners that are pitching police departments include car tracking tools and license plate readers from Flock Safety, gun detection by ZeroEyes, real-time crime center apps from C3 AI and Revir Technologies, and AI that helps compose police reports from Abel Police and Mark43. The piece estimated that the police tech business is worth $11 billion. Based on emails sent by members of Amazon’s law enforcement and safety team, the company is working awfully hard to get a share of those billions.

The company’s aggressive sales work has raised outcry for privacy issues around how police officers might use these tools, which is unsurprising given that AI tools can create inaccuracies and easily be misused. Regulation is still a piecemeal affair and some law enforcement departments have failed to follow what laws do exist about tech use.

“It’s dismaying to see one of the largest and most powerful companies pushing authoritarian surveillance tech in this way,” ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley told Forbes. “I didn’t realize Amazon was serving as a midwife for AI law enforcement technologies.”

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Anchorage Digital has moved out from under its U.S. banking regulator’s order that it institute a compliance program to protect against money-laundering abuses, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announcing the removal of the cease-and-desist order originally issued in 2022.

“The OCC believes that the safety and soundness of the bank and its compliance with laws and regulations does not require the continued existence of the order,” it said in the termination announced on Thursday.

Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley, who has emerged as a high-profile representative of crypto interests in Washington, framed the enforcement action as regulatory “feedback” in celebrating its removal.

“We received — and have now resolved — feedback from regulators as we set the standard for federally chartered custody of digital assets,” he said in a Thursday missive on the company’s website, in which he called Anchorage Digital “the world’s most regulated digital asset bank.”

The OCC and other U.S. banking regulators have, since the start of President Donald Trump’s second administration, sought to relax constraints on crypto industry businesses. New OCC chief Jonathan Gould, who was sworn in last month, was an agency veteran who has also worked in the private sector as chief legal officer for Bitfury.

Anchorage Digital was the first crypto bank to win a full-fledged banking charter from the agency that regulates national banks, and after it did so, that window had closed for a time as the regulators during President Joe Biden’s tenure viewed the industry with more suspicion.

More recently, digital assets issuers including Circle, Ripple and Paxos have again started applying to the OCC to start the bank-charter process.

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