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POLITICO Tech
A big pivot from ‘techlash’ to Trump
00:18:34
President Donald Trump kicked off his return to the White House with a spate of executive orders aimed at the tech sector — and marked a new era for tech in Washington. But the industry’s big show at the inauguration doesn’t mean the next four years will be easy. On POLITICO Tech, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Rob Atkinson, joins host Steven Overly to discuss Trump’s initial actions and why the industry should still have its guard up.
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- [00:01]
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- [00:35]
Stephen Overlea
Hey, welcome to POLITICO tech. Today's Wednesday, January 22nd. I'm Stephen Overlea. President Donald Trump kicked off his return to the White House with a spate of executive orders, some aimed at the tech sector. He delayed the TikTok band, launched an investigation into online censorship, and revoked a bunch of AI safety rules. It's certainly a new era for tech in Washington, and Rob Atkinson has been through many of these eras before. He's the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank he founded in 2006, and that is funded in part by by tech companies. Rob tells me that President Joe Biden was really the first techlash president. And now that he's gone, tech is entering a new phase in its relationship with Washington. But don't let all of the tech billionaires attending the inauguration fool you. Things aren't likely to stay this chummy. So on the show today, Rob weighs in on Trump's initial executive orders and why the industry should still have its guard up. Here's our conversation. Rob, welcome to Politico Tech.
- [02:05]
Rob Atkinson
Thanks a lot, Steve.
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Stephen Overlea
So Trump really hasn't wasted any time rolling out sort of the first phase of his tech agenda, if you will. We saw a lot of executive orders already on AI social media. TikTok, would you say that this was a good day for tech or a bad one?
- [02:23]
Rob Atkinson
No, it was definitely a good day. The Biden administration, you know, overreached when it came to AI regulation, and that was going to hurt the tech industry, is going to hurt the country. So Trump pulling back from that, that, that was definitely a good thing. TikTok, you know, it depends if you're a competitor with TikTok, that wasn't a good thing, but it's a good thing for the overall ecosys, if you will.
- [02:47]
Stephen Overlea
Got it. Well, let's go into each of those a little bit deeper. President Trump did revoke President Biden's AI executive order, which directed the government to kind of mitigate risks around AI technology, particularly These really powerful frontier models. We knew that Trump was likely going to do this. What impact do you think that has now on AI development and on AI regulation?
- [03:11]
Rob Atkinson
It certainly is going to free up AI development. I don't think the original Biden orders were all that restrictive. It was more the message they were sending. They were sending a message that says, this AI thing is pretty dangerous. So I think all those folks who wanted to ban it, have a delay, you know, they were just vastly overstating the risk. I mean, orders of magnitude. So Trump is actually saying, look, let's keep going with AI. It's really important. It's critical to our national security and our future. So he's really sending a message that's saying, we're not going to over regulate this. During my four years, the Biden executive.
- [03:47]
Stephen Overlea
Order did set up the US AI Safety Institute, which one of the sort of key functions of that was like setting standards with other countries, because we are sort of in this global race, global collaboration, however you want to look at it when it comes to artificial intelligence. And the industry did seem to kind of like that piece of it, but that presumably goes away now. Do you anticipate that gets replaced with something else? And will there be a need for the Trump administration to still kind of engage at the global level on AI?
- [04:19]
Rob Atkinson
Two answers. One. NIST is. Everybody loves nist. I used to work at nist. So yeah, I think people like Mike Kratzios at ostp, there'll be a recognition that the Safety Institute was a good thing. It wasn't overly zealous, it wasn't overly regulatory. So you can imagine that keep going in some way, shape or form. When you get to the international part, the risk of the international part is it would be taken over by the Euro types who really, really want to regulate AI. Who, who just the AI act in Europe is so overly restrictive. And you know, when Trump was in office the first time with Mike Kratzios being the cto, you know, they did participate in this global partnership on AI, which I was actually a part of. It was largely symbolic. It didn't really have a lot in real essence of things that actually happened, which was probably good because it delayed bad things and gave people a chance to talk. I frankly don't think we should be engaged too much globally with the exception of pushing back against this overly regulatory reach that the Europeans want to do. There's really no need for global regulation here. In my opinion. If a country wants to have a privacy law, they have a privacy law. If they want to have this, they can have that. The key thing that will be to make sure that countries don't use regulation to squash innovation or to serve protectionist means, which is really what the Europeans have done. They've used these regulations as a way to super their own companies to push back on that.
- [05:58]
Stephen Overlea
AI is going to be such a powerful and potentially transformative technology, a lot for good. And as you said earlier, some folks worry for bad. I mean, it's also going to be a borderless technology. Right. So is there not a need then for countries to ensure or at least keep tabs on, I guess, what's being developed in one part of the world, what's being regulated in another part of the world?
- [06:22]
Rob Atkinson
We absolutely should keep tabs on it. And we absolutely should push for a global regulatory system that isn't overly restrictive because that'll influence US companies. But you know, itif we wrote a piece years, almost two decades ago talking about a global framework for Internet governance, there's no difference between the Internet and AI. They're both global systems. They both have global reach. Our point is it's allowable for countries to have their own privacy rules or their own Internet tax rules for retail, or their own cyber rules, whatever that might be. And there really shouldn't be any difference with AI. If country says, hey, you can't deploy AI in our country, if you have a biased algorithm, that's fine, feel free to do that. But the last thing in the world we need is some sort of global definition of what that means, some sort of global rule. Who's going to make that rule? You know, it's up to us to make our rules about how AI is going to be used in our country. If we want it to be used in a certain way, we decide to do that. And so I really worry that this notion that we're going to get a global regulatory system is really just a fool's error and it's not going to happen. And if it happened, it would probably be so restrictive it would be harmful to the US and innovation. The last point about that is with rogue actors, you know, there's, well, we need to regulate this for safety. Well, what about rogue actors? You know, you can't regulate them. What if they come up with an AI that decides they can make sarin gas? It's like, what are you going to do about that? You think regulation would have stopped that? As we have to be realistic about what regulation can do and what it can't do.
- [08:03]
Stephen Overlea
The last question I have on AI for you, which is, I wonder if you see revoking this executive order creating new pressure on Congress to act here in any way. You know, I remember when the Biden administration rolled out its executive order, they sort of were very adamant that it has the force of law, but the reality was it could always be revoked by the next administration. And here that is the case. And if the next administration that comes along is Democratic, they could potentially put it back in place and we could sort of be on this seesaw, if you will, of AI executive orders. Does Congress need to kind of step in here and make a law of the land?
- [08:43]
Rob Atkinson
No, I actually don't think they do. I think people are getting way over their skis. They're getting panicked. Explain to me where there's been any harm from ChatGPT or Claude or any of these systems. They're just. It just. It doesn't. There. Now, there are discrete areas and my colleague Hodan Omar at ITF wrote a report, looked at 27 or 30 discrete areas. So things like deepfakes, things like election interference, things like how you use this in healthcare. Absolutely. Congress should be doing a lot more, mostly right now looking into it, holding hearings, really getting better information on it. But the idea that we need some overarching uber AI law, I think is really way, way too early. We just don't know how this is evolving. There may be specific areas, as we've laid out, that it's worth Congress looking at, but that's very different than a massive master AI law.
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Stephen Overlea
You know, the other executive order we mentioned, which was expected, relates to TikTok. And Trump has basically given the company more time to find a buyer. And he's given some reprieve to companies that could face fines for continuing to support TikTok now that it's technically banned. I wonder if you see like this TikTok issue as kind of a unique situation or does this say something deeper about US China tech competition going forward.
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Rob Atkinson
On the one level, it's unique. You know, there's this whole mythology out there that the Chinese will never sell this. The algorithm's too valuable. They'd rather have it go dark. That's total nonsense.
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Stephen Overlea
Really? You don't think that's right?
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Rob Atkinson
No, no, no, no, no, no. You're talking billions and tens of billions of dollars. The Chinese would much rather have bytedance have that money. There's no question about that. This would be a big advantage for ByteDance to be able to sell as opposed to going dark and losing the entire value of that asset. So that was posturing on the part of the Chinese government. I think Trump knows that. So now nobody was going to get into any sort of sales negotiation until, you know, they saw that the Supreme Court had ruled like that. So I think now there's going to be sales negotiations. There'll be, there'll be some buyer that the U.S. will approve and, you know, it'll, it'll go forward. It might mean that Trump is wanting to not alienate or irritate Xi Jinping needlessly and kind of, you know, keep his powder dry for other fights that he's going to engage in that, that may be going on here. But I think the main thing is just to say, I don't know how many 130 million TikTok users there are in the US or Trump. A lot of them voted for Trump. So he's like, yeah, why bang that hornet's nest. Let's just, let's just do a block and a block on the going dark and we'll do a sale, right?
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Stephen Overlea
Yeah. It's certainly popular US politics, especially with younger voters, to save TikTok. Be curious to see kind of what trade offs get made, especially if the US does pursue kind of an ownership stake in the company. The way Trump has talked about wanting to. One of the last executive orders I want to talk about. I'm curious what you make of it, and that's the one that relates to online speech and social media. You know, this has been a big talking point in frustration for conservatives, this idea that social media platforms are censoring speech. Trump has now directed his Justice Department to investigate whether the Biden administration put undue pressure on social media to remove content. There are obvious political motives here. Do you see kind of real policy implications for tech or for social media companies in particular?
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Rob Atkinson
Not yet. I think that order, combined with some of the recent announcement we've seen, for example, from Meta and Mark Zuckerberg and others that say, right, yeah, we might have gone a little too far this way. Some of the outside fact checkers have A liberal bias. We're going to try to come back. We're sorry, you know, mea culpa. That combined with the fact that, you know, they've gone and kissed the ring and now you've got this order. This is all, I think, an effort to avoid repealing 230 and really sort of messing things up completely.
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Stephen Overlea
Right, that's section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Yeah.
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Rob Atkinson
Yes. Which, which gives the platforms some legal cover for taking down content or not taking down content. So I think what we're probably going to see is hopefully there'll be a little more, you know, yelling and all, and Trump will be able to say, look, I've done this. I've restored objectivity and free speech to the social media platforms. They've bowed under to me, and hopefully that's the end of it.
- [14:19]
Stephen Overlea
You mentioned tech kind of kissing the ring, and we've seen a lot of this sort of overtures toward Trump, including, you know, at the inauguration, you had tech CEOs in very prime seats right behind the President's family. I'm curious, where does tech go from here, do you think, in terms of this relationship with Trump? Because it's obviously starting on sort of a very cozy note, but we've got four years of Trump as president. It can go in a lot of directions. I'm curious where you sort of see this potentially going.
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Rob Atkinson
Well, you know, on one level, it started on a cozy note. You've had these visits to and to meet with, with the president and Bill Gates talked about that.
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Stephen Overlea
Right.
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Rob Atkinson
And others. But at the same time, if you look at Trump's appointments, many of them are quite skeptical, if not hostile towards big tech. You've got Brendan Carr at the fcc, you've got Gail Slater at doj, you've got Mark Medauer, you know, so he's, he's not putting in place people in his administration who are like, yeah, go tech. It wasn't, it wasn't like early Obama. So that's going to be the conflict between Trump himself, who likes having meetings and likes to be able to do these things. And as you know, for Trump, it's like, this would be like you, you know, having lunch with a bunch of journalists, or me going out and having lunch with a bunch of think tank presidents. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I'm in my, I'm in my element. Trump feels, I think, in his element with these guys. They're, they're billionaires, they're in business, they're successful. And he can do his thing, but when you look at the people he's appointed, that's might be a lot tougher, tougher sailing than, than we think.
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Stephen Overlea
Got it. Sounds like you don't think tech should be sitting easy after a happy inauguration weekend.
- [16:02]
Rob Atkinson
Not at all. Not at all. And there's still an enormous amount of bitterness, anger towards tech. Look, to be honest, we know some of that's ginned up inside the beltway by the sectors and companies who want to hobble Big Tech for their own business reasons. Some of it's people like Steve Bannon who feel like Big Tech is too liberal or too powerful or ra. So this is not going to go away anytime soon. Hopefully the, the worst of the worst won't happen. But Big Tech's got a lot of work left to do here and they shouldn't assume that it's, that it's, you know, great sailing. We see that with, you know, the debate over H1BS where you got Bannon saying, you know, I'm, I'm going to, Bannon and Musk going to go to war over this. Well, there's a big part of the MAGA movement that's more about, you know, American workers and American this. And so there's still going to be a lot of bumps and a lot of, you know, barriers in the road. But, but I do think we've hit peak tech lash and that's in some ways the most important thing to take away from this. And now it'll be a different relationship. It's never going to go back to the Obama years of, oh my gosh, tech is great. Look at all the miracles that tech is doing. We're not going back to that. But I also think we've hit peak tech lash and now we'll be in, you know, ups and downs and fights and wins and victories and losses.
- [17:27]
Stephen Overlea
Got it. Well, Rob, appreciate you being here on Politico Tech.
- [17:30]
Rob Atkinson
My pleasure, Steve. Thank you for having me.
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Stephen Overlea
That's all for today's Politico Tech. If you enjoy Politico Tech, be sure to subscribe. And for more tech news, subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and Morning Tech. Our managing producer is Annie Reiss. Today's show was produced by Kara Taber. I'm Stephen Overleigh. See you back here tomorrow.