The Tech Policy Press Podcast

The study of how hate is expressed in digital media and its relationship to offline harassment and violence is a growing field that touches public policy, content moderation and platform policy, AI governance, and a variety of other topics at the intersection of technology and public discourse. This week, a new journal called the Digital Hate Review launched to give a new home to research and discourse on these issues. To learn more, Justin Hendrix spoke to its editor-in-chief, Matthias J. Becker, who has spent 15 years tracking how hate speech evolves online.

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, an...

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...

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:

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 o...

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 im...

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:

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 teste...

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...

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 an...

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 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 Me...

Late on Friday, June 12, Anthropic announced it had received a letter from the United States Department of Commerce notifying the company that the government had issued an export control directive forcing it to suspend all access to its AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including Anthropic's own foreign-national employees. To comply, the company disabled access to both models for all its customers. The Wall Street Journal called the episode "one of the most powerful examples yet of US government intervention in the AI race."

The White House...

On June 4, Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) released a 269-page bipartisan discussion draft of a bill called the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act of 2026. On the same date, they published an opinion in Bloomberg Law calling for feedback on the draft. “This discussion draft isn’t a final product,” they wrote. “It’s the start of a serious national conversation with workers, researchers, startups, frontier labs, educators, civil society, state leaders, and the American people.” Rep. Trahan joined the podcast to discuss the draft and some of the early criticism levied against it from civil society groups.

On June 12, SpaceX will reportedly offer 555,555,555 shares at $135 apiece in an initial public offering. The IPO is expected to give SpaceX a market value of $1.77 trillion, instantly making it one of the most valuable companies in the world. When combined with his holdings in Tesla, the IPO may also make SpaceX founder Elon Musk—already the world’s richest man—the world’s first trillionaire.

Today’s guests are Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The book considers its subject as a specimen of the current geopolitical moment, promising an “examination...

Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer of Mozilla, has spent the past few months building an argument that the central question in AI isn't open versus closed, but owning versus renting—whether AI becomes something we control or something we lease from a handful of companies. A technologist by background with stops at Twitter, Uber, and the Democratic National Committee, he writes about all of this in his newsletter, Owners Not Renters, and in other outlets, most recently in a New York Times op-ed on what he called the "Mythos moment."

Justin Hendrix spoke to him about th...

As Brussels prepares to unveil a tech sovereignty package on June 3, the political tone around Europe’s digital infrastructure is shifting. A recent investigation by Investigate Europe, published with partners including Tech Policy Press, shows that a confidentiality clause inserted into an EU regulation after industry lobbying allows companies to keep site-level data center energy and water use out of public view, and many operators are not reporting at all. The finding highlights a disconnect between policy ambition and oversight.

What does expanding “technological sovereignty” with real accountability look like in practice? To explore this, Tech Policy Press...

In this episode, we reflect on the 19th edition of CPDP (Computers, Privacy and Data Protection), the major Brussels tech policy conference, held last week under this year's theme, "Competing Visions, Shared Futures." We discuss the dominant debates from the gathering, including the contested Digital Omnibus simplification package, digital and tech sovereignty, researcher access to platform data under the Digital Services Act, the rising prominence of child online safet

We feature voices from across the conference, including Tech Policy Press contributing editor Mark Scott, AlgorithmWatch's Oliver Marsh, the Knight-Georgetown Institute's Peter Chapman, the Center for Democracy and...

On Tuesday, May 12, the Center for Civil Rights and Technology hosted its 2026 annual convening, "All Eyes on Tech: Power, Protection, and the Fights for Civil Rights in the Age of AI," at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. The Center is a joint project of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund, and it engages in advocacy, education, and research on issues at the intersection of civil rights and technology policy.

During the event, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix hosted a conversation with Dr. Ruha Benjamin, an acclaimed author...

On May 5, Common Sense Media, the nonprofit known for its entertainment and technology recommendations for parents, launched its Youth AI Safety Institute, backed by a $20 million annual budget to “define what child-safe AI actually means” and to “rigorously test AI products” and assign them ratings.

The Youth Safety Institute will be led by Bruce Reed, who joined Common Sense Media as Head of AI in March 2025 after serving as President Joe Biden's White House Deputy Chief of Staff, where Politico dubbed him the "AI Whisperer" for leading Biden’s AI Executive Order and securing voluntary commitments from frontier l...

At the end of last month, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chatrie v. United States. The case involves the use of a geofence warrant, which police use to demand information on all cellphones within a certain area and period of time. The outcome of the case, which revolves around Fourth Amendment questions, could have profound implications for location tracking and privacy in the digital age.

To learn more, Tech Policy Press fellow Jake Laperruque, who is monitoring the case, spoke to Michael Price, who serves as litigation director for the Fourth Amendment Center at National...

Is the future something to be calculated and controlled, or something we shape together through democratic struggle? How should we read the convergence of Silicon Valley's "Dark Enlightenment" thinkers with a resurgent authoritarian right, and is Europe truly reckoning with what has shifted in the United States? What is driving the continent's anti-regulatory mood? What counts as "evidence" sufficient to legislate a fast-moving technology, and at what point does the demand for proof become a license for the catastrophe to arrive first?

Justin Hendrix addressed these questions and more with scholar and former European Commission official Paul...

Just days before it was set to begin last week in Lusaka, RightsCon organizer Access Now was forced to announce the annual digital and human rights conference would not proceed after it learned of Chinese pressure on the Zambian government to restrict the participation of delegates from Taiwan. The effective cancellation of the event was a huge blow to Access Now, its local civil society partners in Zambia, and to the global community of rights defenders, some of whom were already traveling when they got the news. To many, it is an ominous signal about the growing challenges to...

In this episode, Tech Policy Press fellow Chris Mills Rodrigo speaks with Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute and the author of two reports on the 'gig-ification' of nursing, to dig into how AI is reshaping the profession from the inside out. Rodrigo and Wells examine what's actually being deployed in hospitals: scheduling algorithms, productivity tools, and a fast-growing app-based contingent workforce that is turning bedside care into something closer to gig work. Wells reports that these trends prefigure the broader adoption of AI in healthcare, raising questions not only about the stability of the...

With artificial intelligence systems increasingly deployed by companies and governments to hoover up every possible unit of data and to make consequential decisions about people's employment, benefits, credit, education, housing, and health care, the United States still has no baseline federal privacy law. This week, House Republicans put a new bill on the table called the SECURE Data Act.

Today’s guest is Eric Null, director of the Privacy & Data Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. He says the bill has significant structural weaknesses even as it seeks to preempt stronger state protections that are already in...

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in December 2023, alleging the company made false public statements about the safety of its platforms while knowing internally that its products facilitated child sexual exploitation. On March 24, a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for willful violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, awarding $375 million in civil penalties.

The next phase is a bench trial, starting May 4, to decide the state's public nuisance claim and determine remedies. Justin Hendrix spoke to Torrez about the types of reforms the state hopes to secure.

What if the most consequential immigration policy decisions in America aren't being made by elected officials, or even by government agencies—but by software? Right now, a sprawling ecosystem of private technology vendors is quietly reshaping who gets flagged, detained, and deported in the United States. At the center of it is Palantir's ImmigrationOS, a platform for end-to-end automated enforcement. But it’s just one piece of a much larger machine.

Today we’ll hear from the authors of a new law review article that argues that private tech vendors have become a third governing power in Americ...

If you read, watch, or listen to financial news, you’ll find there is a boom in discussion over whether the AI boom is a bubble, and what the consequences might be if it bursts. Today’s guest says that if such a crash occurs, it will represent a significant policy opportunity—a potential point of intervention that could lead to meaningful reform of the tech sector.

Asad Ramzanali is the Director of AI and Technology Policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation, and author of the recent report, "After the AI Crash."

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Project Maven, a Department of Defense program launched in April 2017 to apply AI in military targeting and logistics, is now being used in live combat. Katrina Manson is a reporter and the author of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, a book just published by W.W. Norton & Company that tells the history of the program. Justin Hendrix spoke to her about the book and about recent events, including the use of AI targeting in the war in Iran and the battle between the Pentagon and Anthropic over 'red lines' such as...

Last week, The Guardian reported that United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has directed American embassies and consulates to counter foreign propaganda. Notably, the cable apparently endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it, even as it directs diplomats to coordinate with the US military’s psychological operations unit to counter what the administration deems as disinformation.

Today’s guest is Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John's University and a senior editor at Lawfare. In a piece on Lawfare last week, Klonick says that the State Department issuing a formal cab...

This was a landmark week for tech accountability in US courts. Juries in New Mexico and California delivered verdicts finding tech giants Meta and Google liable for harms to young users on their platforms, decisions that are projected to open the door to more lawsuits alleging that social media creates addiction or endangers kids.

Today’s guest sees these developments as positive and in line with the types of thinking he believes will help improve the internet. Olivier Sylvain is a professor at Fordham Law School and the author of a new book titled Reclaiming the Internet: Ho...