The Tech Policy Press Podcast

Amid a frenzy of headlines about AI safety and just two weeks out from a planned meeting of US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping, Justin Hendrix moderated a discussion around the question, what does AI governance actually demand right now? Convened by the the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., the discussion included Amba Kak from the AI Now Institute, Kat Duffy from the Council on Foreign Relations, Miro Plueckebaum from the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, and Jack Shanahan from SAIS ACF and the Center for a New American Security.

Just ahead of the start of the new school year, districts across the United States are issuing new policies on the use of artificial intelligence applications in classrooms. Last Wednesday, New York City effectively banned most student facing AI in all K-8th grade classes while allowing a limited set of approved tools to be used for high schoolers for the upcoming school year. And on the same day, Los Angeles school officials announced the district was placing a one-year moratorium on generative AI for all of its estimated 378,000 students. To learn more about these announcements and the politics driving them, Justin Hendrix spoke to two individuals who covered these matters for Tech Policy Press this summer: Tech Policy Press fellow Chris Mills Rodrigo and audio reporter Laura Karpas, who interned at Tech Policy Press this summer and is currently a graduate student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Tech Policy Press fellow Jake Laperruque , who is also the Deputy Director of Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, spoke to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) about the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and ongoing efforts to reform it.

State legislatures across the United States are actively developing new laws on a range of issues related to artificial intelligence. In Virginia, that process is informed by an entity established by the Virginia General Assembly called the Joint Commission on Technology and Science . To learn more about the Joint Commission and some of its recent work on AI chatbots, Justin Hendrix spoke to its chief policy analyst, Dr. Kira Allmann .

How can human rights and social justice advocates and investigators protect their data and technology infrastructure in an age of rising authoritarianism in the United States and abroad? Earlier this month, a coalition of human rights, justice, and data organizations launched the Technology Freedom Cooperative , a project designed to help nonprofit organizations protect evidence, reduce their dependence on big tech platforms, and "build independent capacity to work with large language models." Justin Hendrix spoke to two of its members, Maheen Khan , director of technology at the Invisible Institute, and Patrick Ball , director of research at HRDAG.

Days into a bellwether trial brought by four states, Meta reached a settlement with a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general to resolve their claims, agreeing to pay up to ~$17 billion and to make a series of teen-safety changes to Instagram and Facebook. The day after the settlement was announced, Tech Policy Press convened a live podcasting recording with to assess the settlement and its implications. Expert guests included: Alissa Cooper , Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) Meetali Jain , Executive Director of Tech Justice Law (TJL) Matthew B. Lawrence , Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law

This month, in partnership with Type Investigations , MIT Technology Review published a feature titled “How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy.” It considers the emergence and impact of the narrative that revolves around the idea of the “censorship industrial complex,” and how a network of aligned right wing actors collaborate to build that narrative. It also details the impact on civil society groups and independent technology researchers who have been targeted with lawsuits, investigations, visa restrictions, and various forms of harassment for their work. This week, Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the authors of the piece about what they learned reporting it, and where the story might go next: Eileen Guo , MIT Technology Review senior reporter for features and investigations, and open source investigative reporter Gisela Perez de Acha .

Headed into the US midterm elections season, the information environment continues to evolve. Millions of people now use AI chatbots, both to retrieve information about elections and to create it. Last week, the Brennan Center for Justice put out an expert brief tackling the question, “Does AI Fight or Fuel Election Disinformation?” Justin Hendrix spoke to one of its authors, Lawrence Norden , vice president of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center.

The midterm election cycle is heating up in the United States, and there are important elections set to take place soon in Brazil, Israel, Sweden, and beyond. AI will be a factor in these elections, offering a new set of tools and techniques for campaigns to try to reach voters. Laura Karpas looked into one new technique that campaigns may try this cycle—focus groups among panels of synthetic voters. She spoke to one researcher who has considered the question of when and how such simulated evidence can be used in campaign research, and another who wonders what the implications may be for the complex interaction between political leaders and public opinion.

The rise of the tech oligarchy threatens democracy in the United States and abroad. In his new book, United States of Oligarchy , Casey Michel —author, journalist, and director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program with the Human Rights Foundation—tells the story of how a small set of extremely wealthy individuals claimed the commanding heights of American government and is making the world safe for authoritarians, and what will be necessary to break their grip.

The United Kingdom has a new prime minister, and he has already moved to put his mark on tech policy —scrapping a scheme for digital ID, shuttering the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT), shifting the Government Digital Service (GDS) to the Department of Culture, Media, and Sports, and reshuffling responsibility for AI policy. To learn more about how the table is being set under Prime Minister Andy Burnham , Justin Hendrix spoke to three individuals who are following these matters closely: James Ball , a journalist and fellow at Tech Policy Press ; Gavin Freeguard , the founder director of a new think tank called State of the Future ; and Rachel Coldicutt , the founder and executive director of Careful Industries .

From Tamagochis to AI companions, generations of machines have been designed to push on our “evolutionary buttons”—ones that ask us to respond to their needs. In this episode, audio reporter Laura Karpas speaks to researchers including the Center for Democracy and Technology's Michal Luria and Harvard Business School's Julian De Freitas to explore the dark patterns in AI companions, and what happens when users go to say “goodbye.”

On July 16, Hugging Face, a company that provides a platform for AI models, datasets, and other machine learning applications, posted a “ security incident disclosure ” to its blog about an “intrusion” into its infrastructure. But this was no typical hack. The company said “it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system,” matching what it said is the “‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting.” A few days later, OpenAI posted to its blog that the agent was in fact “driven by a combination of OpenAI models” with “reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark⁠ of cyber capabilities.” To try to better understand these developments and their implications for the US and international debates over AI governance, Justin Hendrix spoke to two individuals who are following the details closely: Vinh Nguyen , a senior fellow for AI at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former chief responsible AI officer and chief data scientist for operations at the National Security Agency (NSA), and Graham Webster , a lecturer and research scholar in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance at Stanford University, where he leads the DigiChina Project .

Across the world, despots and and wannabe dictators are deploying new tools, both legal and technological, to stifle dissent and oppress. Today’s guest is Jonathon W. Penney , the author of Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age , a book from Cambridge University Press that explores the weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and technologies of control and offers a roadmap for the reforms necessary to push back.

At Tech Policy Press, we’ve monitored the massive influx of money into the Department of Homeland Security to support the Trump administration’s brutal and increasingly lawless immigration crackdown. Last month saw the publication of a report commissioned by Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Surveillance Resistance Lab titled "The Tech Behind Ice: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement, and the Threat to Democracy." Tech Policy Press contributing editor Dean Jackson spoke to two of the report’s authors—Surveillance Resistance Lab founder and executive director Mizue Aizeki and Just Futures Law founding executive director Paromita Shah —about what billions in tech investment is buying DHS and its component agencies, and what is necessary to reverse the authoritarian trajectory the country is on.

When Europe 2031 was published in June, it set off an immediate debate in Brussels and beyond. The fictional near-future scenario authored by a group of AI researchers argues that Europe risks economic and political irrelevance if it fails to compete at the frontier of AI development. Within days of its release, the United States government ordered Anthropic to restrict access to its most advanced AI models for non-US users—an event the report had projected for 2029, underscoring the potential threat. In this episode, Tech Policy Press Deputy Editor Ramsha Jahangir is joined by Europe 2031 co-author Maximilian Negele and AI Now Institute advisor Frederike Kaltheuner , an author of a three-part series for Tech Policy Press that argues Europe's dependency problem runs deeper than frontier model access, to debate what Europe is actually getting wrong, and what it would take to change course.

Since 1985, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, GLAAD, has produced research and advocacy on LGBTQ representation in media. Now the organizations has turned its attention to artificial intelligence. In a new report titled " Build for Everyone: A Framework for LGBTQ Representation and Safety in AI ," GLAAD details the ways that AI impacts and shapes perceptions about the LGTBQ community. Justin Hendrix spoke to Jenni Olson , the senior director of the Social Media Safety Program at GLAAD, about the findings.

Access to affordable, reliable high-speed internet is a prerequisite for nearly every part of modern life, from finding work and finishing schoolwork to seeing a doctor or staying in touch with family. Yet millions of American households remain stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide. That's the starting point for " The Blueprint for Equitable Digital Participation ," a report released in May from Public Knowledge, UnidosUS, and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. Rather than beginning in Washington policy circles, this report centers the lived experiences of low- and moderate-income households to find out what's actually standing in their way and what should be done about it. Justin Hendrix had the chance to dig into the findings with the report’s authors: Alisa Valentin , broadband policy director at Public Knowledge, and Claudia Ruiz , senior civil rights policy advisor at UnidosUS.

In this second of three episodes on xAI's data center buildout in Memphis, Tennessee and Southaven, Mississippi, Justin Hendrix speaks with Amanda Garcia, senior attorney and data center project leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), about the fight over Colossus and Colossus 2 and what it means for disputes over the AI infrastructure boom across the country.

In June 2024 the Greater Memphis, Tennessee Chamber of Commerce announced Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, would build its "Colossus" data center in an old Electrolux factory. Two years on, the story continues to expand alongside the company’s growing footprint, with a second campus, Colossus II, across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi; a contested gray water recycling plant; an ever-rising count of gas turbines; multiple lawsuits; and communities in South Memphis still pressing for straight answers. Few people have tracked all of it more closely than Neil Strebig , a reporter with The Commercial Appeal in Memphis who has covered the xAI story daily from the beginning. He’s attended community meetings and hearings, filed right-to-know requests, parsed the differing interpretations of the Clean Air Act by the EPA, the Shelby County Health Department and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, counted turbines, and spent time with residents living alongside the facilities. The result is a level of detail that few can match. In this conversation, Strebig brings us up to speed on the latest developments — including a newly updated lawsuit citing unpermitted turbines in Southaven, the implications of the SpaceX IPO and the impending IPOs of other AI firms, and the stalled water recycling plant Memphis leaders had counted on. And, he reflects on what it has been like to chase facts as the story spread across two states and a thicket of jurisdictions.