The high-profile presence of several tech CEOs at President Trump’s inauguration should not be viewed as the end to a backlash against tech companies by policymakers, according to two prominent observers highlighting where the industry could still face regulatory obstacles, particularly in the development and marketing of artificial intelligence.
“Between privacy, between cuddling up to rich people, ‘techlash’ is currently in a lull, but it will be coming back,” said James Lewis, director of the strategic technology program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Lewis spoke during a Jan. 21 webinar the industry-backed Information Technology and Innovation Foundation hosted to discuss “The Worst Tech Policies of 2024: How the New Administration and Congress Can Turn the Page.” Also participating were Adam Thierer, resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, and ITIF president Ron Atkinson.
Atkinson had asked panelists to comment on whether the attendance of tech leaders at the president’s swearing-in ceremony -- including xAI’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos -- held positive implications for unregulated innovation in the industry following a period where lawmakers have looked to hold such entities accountable, particularly for their use and control of personal data.
“I would describe our current period as one of sullen discontent,” Lewis said, adding, “There's the concerns over social media” and acknowledging “some truth” to concerns about oligarchy, but noting “the ultimate driver is our failure to come up with a privacy law.”
In the absence of a federal privacy bill that would form the foundation for AI legislation, some states, such as Texas, have introduced bills attempting to foil harms from personal data being used in conjunction with artificial intelligence by banning use cases like social scoring. That bill, as with one that was vetoed in California but is already resurfacing, would also create a central AI regulator. That’s something Musk is on record supporting but which is stridently opposed by free-market conservatives.
The Texas bill was on the top of Thierer’s list for the worst policies of 2024 -- it was introduced Dec. 12 -- but he noted “it could soon become the worst policy of 2025.” In general, he described complicated dynamics at play within the Trump administration in suggesting room for such policies to advance, along with a continued focus on antitrust activity.
“This is the world we live in,” he said, “The political fault lines are not quite as bright in the terms of R and D side, as they used to be.”
Thierer continued: “If you read the [Biden administration] AI Bill of Rights, it was just dripping with dystopian dread and fear about the future. And the positive elements of AI and computational power were given sort of like secondary treatment or consideration. It was all just layering on, grievances and potential harms. But that being said, we've seen from the MAGA world and Mr. Trump himself [share] a lot of his own grievances, about social media, about digital technology.”
Thierer also noted Vice President JD Vance’s support for former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s approach to enforcing antitrust law in tech policy.
“There's been a sort of antitrust jihad by the last administration, specifically Lina Khan's FTC, but also folks at the DOJ to really get quite aggressive on this,” he said. “But what's been most interesting about this moment … is that you've had … conservatives joining in. They've basically been cheering that on and even JD Vance and others have suggested that there's they're sympathetic to that. So I think that's sort of a continuing sort of techlash that will last throughout the Trump years.”