Apple’s Conflict Minerals, The Oppenheimer Moment, and a Drone’s Fatal Failure
This week's big story covers the Democratic Republic of Congo’s suspicion that Apple has conflict minerals in their supply chain.
The second story is from conference “Humanity at Crossroads” in Vienna, where world leaders gathered to consider rules needed to protect humanity from what is said to be this generation’s Oppenheimer Moment.
But first, the death of seven employees of World Central Kitchen in Gaza on April 1st can also be attributed to the failure of the drone to recognize the signs that marked the convoy according to the 1949 Geneva Convention:
The Big Story
Congo’s Conflict Minerals and Apple’s Supply Chain
The Democratic Republic of Congo is concerned that Apple’s supply chain may contain conflict minerals.
Last week, a group of international lawyers representing the Democratic Republic of Congo sent letters to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and its French subsidiary. The letters included a list of questions regarding how Apple monitors its supply chains and demanded answers within 3 weeks.
The DRC government said it is suspicious that some of the 3TG critical minerals: tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold, that Apple sources from its suppliers are smuggled out of Congo to neighbouring Rwanda and then infiltrated into the global supply chain.
The DRC has some of the world’s most abundant natural resources, and the Eastern DRC holds vast amounts of gold and one of the world’s largest tantalum deposits.
In the same region, there are over 250 armed groups that frequently take over mines to finance arms. The most prominent is the M23 militia, which is increasingly acting as a conventional army with sophisticated firepower and equipment. The UN, Human Rights Watch, and other independent observers have documented Rwandan support to the M23 rebels, including transfers of arms and ammunition, facilitating recruitment, and even direct combat support. On Tuesday, a key mining town of tantalum in the Eastern DRC fell into the hands of M23, after heavy clashes with government troops.
“Rwanda last year exported close to $1bn in gold, tin, tantalum and tungsten, even though the country has few mineral deposits of its own. It’s all coming from DRC — that’s obvious,” Nicolas Kazadi, the DRC’s finance minister, said at FT’s Commodities Global Summitlast year.
Apple is known for rigidly policing its sprawling supply chain. Since 2009, the company has cut ties with 25 manufacturing supplier facilities and 231 suppliers. The 2024 supply chain progress reportstates that: “of all 221 smelters and refiners of 3TG determined to be in our supply chain […] Apple found no reasonable basis for concluding that any such smelter or refiner sourced 3TG that directly or indirectly financed or benefited armed groups in the DRC or an adjoining country.”
Robert Amsterdam, founding partner of Amsterdam & Partners LLP, stated in a press release at the firm’s website that: “those claims do not appear to be based on concrete, verifiable evidence. The world’s eyes are wide shut: Rwanda’s production of key 3T minerals is near zero, and yet big tech companies say their minerals are sourced in Rwanda.”
The press release coincided with a report in which Amsterdam & Partners LLP states that Rwanda launders 3TG minerals from the DRC.
Source: Apple’s 2024 supply chain progress report
AI’s Oppenheimer Moment
This week, representatives of 140 countries gathered in Vienna for the conference “Humanity at the Crossroads: Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Challenge of Regulation.”
The aim of the conference, hosted by the Austrian Federal Minister for European and International Affairs, was to consider the rules needed to protect humanity and give voice to those who are alarmed by the prospect of applying Silicon Valley-style disruption to industrial warfare.
The suggestions and thoughts varied from wanting to begin drafting a new treaty along the lines of others prohibiting chemical or nuclear weapons to suggesting that trade controls and humanitarian laws already existing are sufficient.
“This is the Oppenheimer Moment of our generation,” said Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg and military strategist Frank Sauer said the time for testing is over; we are now living in a “Hiroshima moment.”
Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s top disarmament official and the curator of the conference said that “a classical approach to arms control doesn’t work because we’re not talking about a single weapons system but a combination of dual-use technologies.” Jaan Tallinn, an early investor in Alphabet Inc.’s AI platform DeepMind Technologies commented on this topic with that “Silicon Valley’s incentives might not be aligned with the rest of humanity.”
The Israeli Iron Dome missile defence system, left, intercepts rockets fired by Hamas in May 2021. Photographer: Anas Baba/AFP/Getty Images. Source: Bloomberg. Retrieved on 2/2/2024.
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