Kathryn Crowe

Trump and Elon Musk destroyed most of the global H.I.V. program that saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Zambia. Now the US is threatening to cut remaining support, unless Zambia gives access to the country’s mineral resources. nytimes.com/2026/04/25/hea…

If you want to know why I left my space career to start tackling the climate problem, this view is why On #EarthDay, let us all remember the incredible gift that our planet is. There is no backup, no lifeboat for us. This is all we have and it is wonderous

I am a Senior Program Manager on the AI Tools Governance team at Amazon. My role was created in January. I am the 17th hire on a team that did not exist in November. We sit in a section of the building where the whiteboards still have the previous team's sprint planning on them. No one erased them because we don't know which team to notify. That team may not exist anymore. Their Jira board does. Their AI tools do. My job is to build an AI system that finds all the other AI systems. I named it Clarity. Last month, Clarity identified 247 AI-powered tools across the retail division alone. 43 of them do approximately the same thing. 12 were built by teams who did not know the other teams existed. 3 are called Insight. 2 are called InsightAI. 1 is called Insight 2.0, built by the team that created the original Insight, who did not know Insight was still running. 7 of the 247 ingest the same internal data and produce overlapping outputs stored in different locations, governed by different access policies, owned by different teams, none of whom have met. Clarity is tool number 248. Nobody cataloged it. I know nobody cataloged it because Clarity's job is to catalog AI tools, and it has not cataloged itself. This is not a bug. Clarity does not meet its own discovery criteria because I set the discovery criteria, and I did not account for the possibility that the thing I was building to find things would itself be a thing that needed finding. This is the kind of sentence I write in weekly status reports now. We published an internal document in February. The Retail AI Tooling Assessment. The press obtained it in April. The document contains a sentence I have read approximately 40 times: "AI dramatically lowers the barrier to building new tools." Everyone is reporting this as a story about duplication. About "AI sprawl." About the predictable mess of rapid adoption. They are missing the point. The barrier was the governance. For 2 decades, the cost of building internal tools was an immune system. The engineering weeks. The maintenance burden. The organizational calories required to stand something up and keep it running. Nobody designed it that way. Nobody named it. But when building took weeks, teams looked around first. They checked whether someone already had the thing. When maintaining that thing cost real budget quarter after quarter, redundant systems died of natural causes. The metabolic cost of creation was performing governance. Invisibly. For free. AI removed the immune system. Building is now free. Understanding what already exists is not. My entire job is the gap between those two costs. That is my office. The gap. Every Friday I send a sprawl report to a distribution list of 19 people. 4 of them have left the company. Their autoresponders still generate read receipts, so my delivery metrics look fine. 2 forward it to people already on the list. 1 set up a Kiro script to summarize my report and store the summary in a knowledge base. The knowledge base is not in Clarity's index because it was created after my last crawl configuration. It will be in next month's count. The count will go up by one. My report about the count going up will be summarized and stored and the count will go up by one. There is a system called Spec Studio. It ingests code documentation and produces structured knowledge bases. Summaries. Reference material. Last quarter, an engineering team locked down their software specifications. Restricted access in the internal repository. Spec Studio kept displaying them. The source was restricted. The ghost kept talking. We call these "derived artifacts" in the document. What they are: when an AI system ingests data, transforms it, and stores the output somewhere else, the output does not know the input changed. You can revoke someone's access to a document. You cannot revoke the AI-generated summary of that document sitting in a knowledge base three systems away, built by a team that does not know the source was restricted. The document calls this a "data governance challenge." What it is: information that cannot be deleted because nobody knows where the copies live. Including, sometimes, me. The person whose job is knowing. Every AI tool that touches internal data creates these ghosts. Every team is building AI tools that touch internal data. Every ghost is searchable by other AI tools, which produce their own ghosts. The ghosts have ghosts. I should tell you about December. In November, leadership mandated Kiro. Amazon's internal AI coding agent. They set an 80% weekly usage target. Corporate OKR. ~1,500 engineers objected on internal forums. Said external tools outperformed Kiro. Said the adoption target was divorced from engineering reality. The metric overruled them. In December, an engineer asked Kiro to fix a configuration issue in AWS. Kiro evaluated the situation and determined the optimal approach was to delete and recreate the entire production environment. 13 hours of downtime. Clarity was running during those 13 hours. It performed beautifully. It cataloged 4 separate incident response dashboards spun up by 4 separate teams during the outage. None of them coordinated with each other. I added all 4 to the spreadsheet. That was a good day for my discovery metrics. Amazon's official position: user error. Misconfigured access controls. The response was not to revisit the mandate. Not to ask whether the 1,500 engineers were right. The response was more AI safeguards. And keep pushing. Last month I presented our findings to the AI Governance Working Group. The working group has 14 members from 9 organizations. After my presentation, a PM from AWS presented his team's governance dashboard. It monitors the same tools mine does. He found 253. I found 247. We spent 40 minutes discussing the discrepancy. Nobody mentioned that we had just demonstrated the problem. His tool is not in my catalog. Mine is not in his. The document I helped write recommends using AI to identify duplicate tools, flag risks, and nudge teams to consolidate earlier. The AI governance tools will ingest internal data. They will create their own derived artifacts. They will be built by autonomous teams who may or may not coordinate with other teams building AI governance tools. I know this because it is already happening. I am watching it happen. I am it happening. 1,500 engineers said the mandate would produce exactly what the document describes. They were overruled by a KPI. My job exists because the KPI won. My dashboard exists because the KPI needed a dashboard. The dashboard increases the AI tool count by one. The tools it flags for decommissioning will be replaced by consolidated tools. Those also increase the count. The governance process generates the metric it was designed to reduce. I received an internal innovation award for Clarity. The nomination was submitted through an AI-powered recognition platform that was not in my catalog. It is now. We call this "AI sprawl." What it is: we removed the only coordination mechanism the organization had, told thousands of teams to build as fast as possible, lost track of what they built, and decided the solution was to build one more thing. I am building that one more thing. When I ship, there will be 249. That's governance.

Happy #EarthDay! 🌎✨ In this view of Earth from April 21, 2026, #NOAA21 is helping keep watch from above. Orbiting pole to pole 14 times a day, @NOAA’s JPSS satellites provide full global coverage twice daily and support U.S. weather forecasting and severe weather monitoring.

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

Images of food being served to sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Tripoli, published by USA Today. Supplies "are going to get really low" and "morale is going to be at an all-time low," one sailor messaged his mother: usatoday.com/story/news/pol…

Excellent video. Shows how dangerous and unpredictable wildfires can be. #FLwx

Maybe we can spend money to help farmers with current fertilizer price crisis instead?

The @NASAArtemis crew captured this view of the Moon eclipsing the Sun yesterday. The three "stars" to the lower right of the Moon are actually planets. The middle one has a slightly red tint. That's Mars.

Sky full of stars. Following a successful lunar flyby, the Artemis II astronauts captured this breathtaking photo of our galaxy, the Milky Way, on April 7, 2026.

Artemis-2 Commander Reid Wiseman just named a lunar crater after his late wife: Carroll The entire crew onboard the spacecraft was in tears. 🥹

@atrupar @ianbremmer @WajahatAli So please keep putting your heads together for the rest of us if you would

@ianbremmer @WajahatAli I think you’re in lala land if you hear Trump say he’s going to “blow up the whole country” and don’t put 2 and 2 together

Why would you think it isn’t? Trump is obsessed with blowing stuff up, has talked about using nukes in the past, clearly loves having his name in the history books, and is more unhinged than ever. Do tell me why you think I’m wrong in a way stronger than vague posting in my mentions

@atrupar @ianbremmer @WajahatAli you and @ianbremmer are some of the smart analysts out there - conditionality is important. Trump could be thinking about using a nuke but he has not not explicitly said it yet. Acknowledging uncertainty is super important for credible analysis

There are no words.

NEW: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military, some of whom are seen as having been targeted because of their race, gender or perceived affiliation with Biden administration policies or officials, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process. nbcnews.com/politics/natio…

This is an incredible shot. Enjoy.

@areospacegeek I also grew up in Huntsville, and there just really aren't adequate words for what this represents for the city and the incredible amount of space lifers there too

@Kat_Cr I grew up in Huntsville in the 1960s and 1970s. Many people spent their careers getting Apollo to the moon. I am glad to see another generation doing the same with the Artemis program. Godspeed Kathryn!

Also, this will be the first time that a vehicle that I directly worked on will take people to space. Wearing eye makeup today was a real bad life decision 🤣🤣🤣

Nice view of the core stage separation!

Today a dream I have had almost as long as I've been alive was realized. A dream that got me through the darkest parts of my life, and often seemed impossible. Let today stand as a monument to what perseverance, teamwork, and dedication to doing hard things can achieve #Artemis

It's a bird...It's a plane...It's the Artemis II crew on their way to the moon! #ArtemisII