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 ...
Jun 21, 2026•43 min
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 ...
Jun 17, 2026•32 min
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 Amer...
Jun 14, 2026•27 min
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...
Jun 07, 2026•49 min
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 ...
Jun 03, 2026•47 min
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 ...
May 31, 2026•35 min
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 ac...
May 31, 2026•43 min
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, T...
May 24, 2026•47 min
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 Poli...
May 21, 2026•29 min
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...
May 17, 2026•42 min
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 lic...
May 10, 2026•45 min
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...
May 10, 2026•30 min
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 repor...
May 03, 2026•26 min
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 & T...
Apr 26, 2026•29 min
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....
Apr 22, 2026•30 min
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 la...
Apr 19, 2026•42 min
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...
Apr 12, 2026•31 min
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 be...
Apr 09, 2026•47 min
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 edito...
Apr 05, 2026•34 min
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 ...
Mar 29, 2026•46 min
AI hype is everywhere, and the CEOs of many tech firms are promising that the tech will soon eclipse human intelligence. The trillions in investment towards this goal and the massive deployment of capital and the human and natural resources it purchases both requires this kind of hype and causes it to compound. Today’s guests are studying this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, building out a line of inquiry they call " Hype Studies ." It's the subject of an occasional series of contribu...
Mar 29, 2026•46 min
Across the world, governments and other institutions are racing to apply artificial intelligence in countless ways. In a draft paper forthcoming in the UC Law Journal titled "How AI Destroys Institutions," Boston University law professors Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey argue that the design of AI systems—from large language models to predictive and automated decision tools—is fundamentally incompatible with the civic institutions that hold democratic society together, including the rule of l...
Mar 22, 2026•43 min
Early this year, following the deaths of Keith Porter , Renee Good , and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents and the violent immigration raids on communities across the United States, 1,500 Google workers signed a new petition demanding the company cut contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Justin Hendrix spoke to two of the employees who signed the petition about why they signed it, the environment inside the company, and how the...
Mar 15, 2026•34 min
Online fraud has become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises on the planet. Deepfake fraud cases are surging, and Deloitte analysts project that generative AI-driven banking fraud alone could climb to roughly as much as $40 billion in the US alone by 2027. The problem is not just the volume. It's the architecture. These are no longer opportunistic scams—they are industrialized, AI-assisted operations, and the synthetic media tools that power them are becoming cheaper and more convinci...
Mar 13, 2026•36 min
Today's guest has spent thirty years on the front lines of one of the defining battles at the intersection of technology and democracy: privacy and the fight for who controls your digital life. Cindy Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and she has been in the room for some of the most consequential fights over digital rights since the internet became part of everyday life—from fighting for encryption in the 90s, to the NSA mass surveillance revelations, to...
Mar 08, 2026•41 min
In their new book, Move Slow and Upgrade: The Power of Incremental Innovation , Evan Selinger, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology and Albert Fox Cahn , founder in residence of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), argue that society is over-fixated on disruptive innovation over the kind of steady incrementalism that can deliver sustainable returns over longer time frames. They argue in favor of more careful deliberation and adopting w...
Mar 01, 2026•46 min
The Pentagon wants AI that can fight wars — without limits. One of the United States’ leading AI companies says there are lines it won't cross. And this week, that standoff turned into an all-out confrontation. To discuss the implications of the dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon, including the determination that the company represents a supply chain risk, Justin Hendrix spoke to two experts: Kat Duffy , senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations,...
Feb 28, 2026•44 min
Concerns about synthetic media and coordinated manipulation of online platforms have moved from theoretical worry to documented reality. Researchers, regulators, and civil society organizations are working to understand how algorithmically driven content recommendation systems can be exploited — not just by ideologically motivated actors, but by ordinary users pursuing financial gain. Fundación Maldita.es is a Spanish nonprofit that has been working on information integrity and fact-checking sin...
Feb 22, 2026•30 min
As AI technologies proliferate, a growing number of people are asking what it means to live in a world dominated by algorithms and automated systems—and what gets lost when those systems optimize human behavior at scale. These questions sit at the intersection of political theory, technology policy, and everyday life, and they are drawing scholars from fields well outside computer science into the conversation. José Marichal is a political scientist at California Lutheran University who has been...
Feb 22, 2026•47 min
This week marks the second DSA and Platform Regulation conference in Amsterdam, where experts will convene to consider the Digital Services Act (DSA) two years after it entered full effect across the European Union. Over that period, the law has been tested by national elections, geopolitical tensions, high-profile enforcement actions, and the rapid rise of generative AI. It has become both a benchmark for platform accountability and a political lightning rod. Ahead of the conference, Tech Polic...
Feb 15, 2026•30 min
