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AI, China, and the fight over free speech: Takeaways from POLITICO’s Tech Summit
00:26:55
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Panasonic Representative
For over a century, Panasonic has harnessed the power of innovation to advance industry and improve lives. Today we are continuing that legacy by investing in US Based manufacturing, reinforcing resilient and secure supply chains and creating high quality future ready jobs. Learn more about how Panasonic's efforts are directly supporting economic competitiveness and long term energy security.
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Brendan Bordelon
Foreign.
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Steven Overly
Hey, welcome back to Politico Tech. I'm Steven Overle and on this show I break down tech politics and policy with the people shaping our digital future. Earlier this week, Politico hosted its annual AI and Tech summit and the lineup was stacked. Now, I may be biased because I helped book the speakers, but on stage was interview after interview with lawmakers and White House officials diving into AI online speech competition with China and a whole lot more. So on the show today, I asked Politico Tech reporters Brendan Bordelon and Anthony Adragna to join me to discuss the key moments and where tech policy is headed. Here's our conversation. Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast.
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Anthony Adragna
Thank you for having me.
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Brendan Bordelon
Yeah, thanks for having me.
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Steven Overly
A big topic at our summit and just in the news in general right now is really online speech. You know, after the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, many Republicans have called for a crackdown on social media posts that they find objectionable, have called for people to be fired or for students to be kicked out of school. But when we spoke with Republicans at the summit, they seemed to stand by the First Amendment. Here's Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission.
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Brendan Bordelon
I think you can draw a pretty clear line and the Supreme Court has done this for decades that, you know, our First Amendment, our free speech tradition protects, you know, almost all speech. But there are certain categories of posts of, of content that are unprotected by the First Amendment. Those are things like incitement to violence. There's of things like fighting words. And so I think that's potentially a relatively small category of speech. But yeah, incitement to violence is not protected.
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Steven Overly
Brendan, what did you make of his comments?
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Brendan Bordelon
Yeah, it was a pretty big moment I think, given what we've seen in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, which was just this sort of increasing, almost like frantic, hysterical pile on from particularly members of the administration, the Trump administration, also some of their big boosters in Congress just increasingly concerned about the tenor of speech online, talking about increasingly aggressive measures to crack down on that. And it was almost like we were watching some Republicans step back in real time on Tuesday from the sort of cliff saying we need to ban People from social media for life if they belittled Charlie Kirk's death. This was actually a proposal put out by Republican Congressman Clay Higgins. We. We saw the Attorney General talking about prosecuting people for hate speech, which, again, is something that you really can't do under the First Amendment. It's something you almost never hear from Republicans. Usually they say hate speech is free speech. So it was particularly from Carr, who I think in recent years has made it clear that he has hitched his cart to the presidents to step back from that in a measured way. He didn't come out and say that this is a terrible assault on free speech and everything like that, which I think he certainly would have done if we would have seen a Democratic president making these kind of comments. But it was notable, and I think there was certainly a split developing within the Republican Party. I know you're gonna ask about Ted Cruz later, who also sort of stepped back from this, which I think, personally, I think it could have gone either way with Cruz as well, because he is a big MAGA guy in some ways. He also has split from the Trump administration on things like tariffs. So it's gonna be interesting to see how it develops. I don't think the Trump administration is going to let up on this. If you've seen, like, Stephen and the Vice President talking earlier this week, they made it pretty clear that they are looking to take the conversation around Charlie Kirk and sort of weaponize it in a way that goes after the broader institutional left. They want to say that the institutional left is responsible for this assassination. They're clearly willing to crack down on a wide range of protected speech, online and offline to do that. It's going to be interesting to see where it develops. But it was an early signal that there's going to be. It's going to be a tougher fight, I think, to get all Republicans on board for the Trump administration on this effort. Maybe they anticipated.
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Steven Overly
You mentioned Senator Cruz, and he was at the summit, and, you know, he also defended the First Amendment and free speech, but he sort of clarified that that means you can't go to jail for what you say. But then he stood by this idea of naming and shaming, as he called it. You know, what we're seeing right now with people really being singled out, you know, their jobs being threatened. Here's what Cruz had to say.
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Brendan Bordelon
Naming and shaming is. Is a First Amendment consequence. Just like John Stuart Mill said, the best response to bad speech is more speech. And naming and shaming is part of a functioning and vibrant democracy.
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Steven Overly
Anthony, I'd like to hear from you. What kind of pressure does this put on social media companies in particular to bow to politicians who are not necessarily passing laws, but they're certainly exerting influence here on these free speech decisions?
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Anthony Adragna
Yeah, I think there's a lot of pressure potentially here that's been put on folks here in Washington, and I think we're still trying to navigate that landscape. I think there's been a lot of legislative proposals that have not got a lot of oxygen so far. I think the Kirk assassination and murder may offer some additional momentum for trying to enact some of those. That's something that Senator Klobuchar, I know we're going to talk about something she alluded to as well, but I think we're going to have to wait and see. There have been a lot of moments, if you will, where tech companies have had the opportunity to really engage and try to prod lawmakers. They've not so far, certainly not successfully. And so I think we'll have to wait and see if this time is different.
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Steven Overly
Well, and it's interesting because we've seen some companies, I think of Meta in particular and others kind of walk back some of their content moderation practices, especially since Trump became president, because they know that conservatives traditionally have wanted, like, unfettered speech on all these social media platforms. But now we're hearing a different tune. And, you know, after this, this killing of Charlie Kirk, and we're also seeing new social media companies get targeted, like Blue sky, for instance, it feels like the debate around speech online is not only renewed, but it's maybe taken on kind of a new tenor in a lot of ways.
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Anthony Adragna
I think you're absolutely right. And as Brandon knows better than I do, I think policymakers often really lag, particularly with tech policy in terms of how they respond and adapt to the public conversation. So I think we are seeing that in real time. I think there's an additional urgency here, particularly with the president weighing in and really imploring the platforms to do more. You know, we've seen them react. They told us quite vociferously that they took action pretty much immediately upon the murder and, and took down videos. And so I think we'll have to wait and see what the public policy reaction is. As always, I think the open question is sort of attention in Washington is a really fickle and, and short thing. And so whether or not the attention this week that understandably and deservedly is put to these sort of questions, whether or not that translates into a. An actual policy response. I think we have to wait and see.
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Steven Overly
You know, it was actually the Democrat on stage at the summit, Senator Amy Klobuchar, who called for social media regulation around hate speech. This is, you know, she's wanting to rein in these companies for a while, but sort of said there's greater urgency now because of real world violence. Here's what Senator Klobuchar had to say.
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Anthony Adragna
I still believe that I've got an obligation to the people of this country to find some way to put some rules in place when it comes to these platforms. It's very clear if we just keep letting this go, it's going to get worse and worse. And it's very clear that we could actually do some things when you look at other countries.
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Steven Overly
Brendan, you interviewed Klobuchar on stage. Were you surprised by what she said? I mean, do you feel like Democrats are differentiating themselves at all in this moment?
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Brendan Bordelon
I can't say I was surprised. I was intrigued by the inability of the senator who's in Democratic leadership to significantly differentiate herself from the Republican. Again, I think sort of hysteria around the content that we've seen online in the wake of Kirk's assassination. That's what you do as a politician, right. You're supposed to say, hey, you know, we would do things differently, particularly when you're in the opposition. Right. And when you see such a. You know, I want to go back really briefly to what you were saying, talking about with the tech platforms and the pressure that Republicans are putting on them to moderate this content. It's kind of insane to watch because for a very long time, Republic, the pressure was completely on the other side. It was let keep everything up. And, you know, they can say we're in an emergency right now. They can say that political violence is spiking. And I think that's clear on both sides that is happening. We were in an emergency as well during COVID right. People were dying every day from a virus, hundreds or thousands of people. And there was a lot of concern about misinformation about the virus at that time. And Republicans said, you take that down, you're censoring people. That is completely inappropriate. It's a reasonable ideological stance to take. But when you flip on that on a dime, when it's, you know, content you no longer like, when it doesn't serve your political purposes, it's very hard to take that seriously. And I feel like Democrats have a opportunity here to differentiate themselves. I mean, look, it's no secret that they're Struggling with young people who are, you know, very online. I don't think the censorship question conversation of the last five years has worked out very well for them, as evidenced by the last couple of elections, particularly last year. I understand that Klobuchar and I understand that a lot of lawmakers have very real concerns about disinformation, hate speech, the general toxic discourse online. Senator Klobuchar lost a friend in a shooting earlier this year. I don't know to what extent in Minnesota. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know to what extent that was fueled by Internet concerns, but there's gotta be a way for the Democratic Party to say, hey, we also care about free speech, and we're not really sure that the Republicans do when it's just their side that they want to boost while cracking down on any content that could potentially hurt them or somehow hurt their political prospects. It's strange to me that that conversation is not being had on the Democratic side because it seems like a way to. Again, it doesn't mean that you give up on all of your tech regulation efforts and doesn't even mean that you give up on the bipartisan tech regulation efforts.
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Anthony Adragna
I just didn't.
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Brendan Bordelon
I didn't really hear that from the senator. You know, she was much more interested in talking about how to regulate speech as opposed to how to make sure that protected speech, First Amendment, protected speech is protected online.
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Steven Overly
Anthony, you want to weigh in here?
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Anthony Adragna
Well, yeah, I actually was really struck by what Brendan just said, actually. I thought the senator actually took a more conciliatory approach to a lot of this and, you know, not breaking from certainly her talking points or anything. But I think my takeaway from somebody who wasn't on stage with her, but who was writing about it was certainly cracking the door for more collaboration with Republicans. And maybe that's off base, but I think the overall takeaway that I've had in the week after this murder has been lawmakers trying to struggle and reckon with what the public policy response should be and not really having good answer.
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Steven Overly
Well, that was the question on my mind is like, does all of this rhetoric lead to any actually policymaking or the passing of any laws? Because we know that Congress has tried and failed many times to pass any sort of meaningful tech policy, social media policy legislation. Brendan, do you want to weigh in here?
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Brendan Bordelon
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I kind of want to respond to what Anthony was saying when she. He said that Senate, the Senator Klobuchar was striking a conciliatory tone with Republicans talking about ways she worked, she Actually name checked a bunch of Republican senators that she's working with in terms of like content, moderation, section 230 reform, that kind of thing. I think that was deliberate. And I think she's trying to make a sort of split between her Senate Republican colleagues, who even Ted Cruz, you know, I think is trying to strike a balance between the outrage they feel over content that is belittling Charlie Kirk's death, making light of it, maybe even celebrating it. Also the concern that people have over these sort of essentially snuff videos that you see online. You know, it's very graphic video where I think, and again, this goes back to the politics. You know, this may miss the moment. I mean, you can talk about legislation that will prevent these kind of videos, these very graphic videos from appearing on everybody's feeds. And that's important, I think, to a certain extent. But the broader political conversation right now, I think, in the United States is about what this administration is doing. I mean, look, Congress increasingly doesn't really have a lot of sway on these big policy questions. A lot of it's coming from the White House. And so when Klobuchar says, hey, I'm working with Lindsey Graham, I'm working with all these, with Marsha Blackburn on this stuff, that's great. But like people are paying attention to the President and the president is saying, we're going to squash this speech that we disagree with. We are going to go after people who, not just getting them fired or whatever, the naming and shaming thing, but we're going to use the powers of the state to go after people that are posting content we disagree with. I think people may be looking for a more robust response from the opposition party on that and beyond. Just like, well, we're working with the senators that we like. And I just, we'll see where that goes. But that's just kind of my reaction what Anthony was saying. I think he's right that people, you know, she is trying to strike a conciliatory tone. I don't know if that's what her voters necessarily want at the moment, particularly when you see something that's a little bit less than a conciliatory tone coming out of the White House.
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Steven Overly
Foreign.
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Panasonic Representative
For over a century, Panasonic has harnessed the power of innovation to advance industry and improve lives. Today, we are continuing that legacy by investing in US Based manufacturing, reinforcing resilient and secure supply chains, and creating high quality future ready jobs. Learn more about how Panasonic's efforts are directly supporting economic, competitiveness and long term energy security.
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Steven Overly
I want to pivot here to AI because this is another big topic that we talked about and one of the themes that emerged for me from the conversations was this ongoing divide between state and federal AI laws. You have the Trump administration pushing very hard to deregulate, pushing very hard to accelerate the development of AI. Meanwhile, you have states kind of looking at Washington not seeing a lot of action on AI regulation and trying to step into the void. California in particular took some hits. Here's a clip of the White House senior AI policy advisor, Sriram Krishnan.
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Anthony Adragna
We need to make sure that we are harnessing all of our resources and making sure we win. And this is one of the reasons when we talk about, say, state legislation, we don't want California to set the rules for AI across the country.
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Steven Overly
Brendan, talk about this effort to kind of halt state AI laws. It already failed once in Washington. Where does this rift between Sacramento and Washington seem to be headed?
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Brendan Bordelon
Yeah, it's a good question. I think that Republicans have long, you know, I think enjoyed setting up California as a foil to their various policy initiatives. California is increasingly sort of the boogeyman for Republicans, especially given Gavin Newsom's likely 2028 presidential run. So I think to the extent that they can set up this sort of dichotomy between this accelerating tech ecosystem that they're trying to build in Washington and they have an increasing sort of stable of tech people behind them and the sort of like sclerotic, I think, onerous regulations that they say are coming out of California that they think that can probably benefit them politically. And I think that's part of what's going on. I think it's a little bit disingenuous to say that California is sort of like a drag on the AI industry in a lot of ways. The government out there is doing a pretty good job of integrating AI tools into its work. It's doing, it's trying to, as far as I understand, it's trying to do a pretty good job of building out infrastructure for that. California does have, you know, a lot more red tape than I think folks in D.C. are comfortable with at the moment. When it's, particularly when it comes to infrastructure build out, I don't think that's unique to California. New York is also often mentioned in this conversation. Yeah, in terms of the likelihood of success, most people in the tech lobby do not want to see a patchwork of state laws. They really don't like what's coming out of California. But also just generally, they don't want to have a bunch of different laws that they have to follow. Sometimes they're conflicting. It's similar to sort of the data privacy situation. I think what's becoming sort of clear and Klobuchar made this point, I think some Republicans would agree preempting state laws might be fine on AI, but you need to have some sort of federal AI rules or regulations then that can sort of fill that gap. Because if states aren't regulating and if the federal government's not regulating, you're going to have a problem in their view. Until that happens, I do think it's going to be difficult to preempt state AI laws, you know, particularly because I think you do need some Democratic votes and I don't think they're going to want to do that even if Republicans are all on board. So far they're not.
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Steven Overly
Anthony, I'm curious. You know, Senator Cruz said at the summit that his idea of a moratorium on state AI laws is not at all dead. Is there any life to that on Capitol Hill where he got pushback from Republicans?
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Anthony Adragna
I was surprised to hear from Senator Cruz that, you know, who obviously, you know, chairs the Commerce Committee. He has a lot of influence here in how this debate proceeds. But teasing the idea of something like an AI moratorium that was rejected not due to Democratic votes but due to Republican opposition from people like Marsha Blackburn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, Steve Bannon, you know, folks that are not at all opposed to the president's worldview. I thought that was really interesting and notable. I think we'll have to wait and see where that goes from here. And I personally am still skeptical that that idea is going to get renewed life. I think there's still even beyond the names that I just name checked, there was a lot of opposition from rank and file Republicans to the idea of a 10 year certainly moratorium. Brett Guthrie, who's the head of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, J. O Bernalti, who's sort of like the House guru on all things AI, have teased their own proposal. We've not seen that yet, but I think that's far more likely to be something that tries to encompass a lot of the debate here. Cruz has offered his own proposal, which is a regulatory sandbox. Honestly, candidly, having covered Ted Cruz for a long time, I thought it was a lot more nuanced than what I'm used to from him. And I thought it did include certain protections. Probably not enough from the consumer advocate side, but far more than I was expecting and sort of opt outs from a complete deregulatory approach whatsoever. So I thought that was more nuanced than I was expecting and I thought it was a serious proposal that could prompt, you know, kind of bipartisan discussion. He also hasn't indicated whether or not there's going to be a legislative hearing markup, anything to advance that proposal. But I think certainly the discussion has been more nuanced and more serious than, honestly I think I thought going into this of late.
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Steven Overly
Brendan, I can see you want to weigh in here.
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Brendan Bordelon
Yeah, yeah. If I could just jump in real quick because something Anthony said made me think, you know, when he was talking about Marsha Blackburn being opposed to this. Marjorie Taylor Greene, I mentioned earlier, you know, the tech lobby needs to get on the same page in terms of preemption. But frankly, the Republican Party is not on the same page. And it's sort of this debate, I think, is sort of a microcosm of the broader split, you see between this Trump wing of the party that for various reasons has embraced a former foe in Silicon Valley. You see it with the president, you see it with some folks like Cruz now who used to really, you know, just weigh in, rail against these companies. But Cruise has taken a much more conciliatory tone towards the whole sector and folks who are still very skeptical of the tech industry, Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, even somebody like Blackburn. Right. Who I think. And those folks would like to see tougher AI regulations, I think tougher regulations on a wide range of tech stuff. They're now having to negotiate with a bunch of these folks who are in the White House. Right. So it's difficult, I think, to see where the Republican Party is going to go, which side is going to win out here. But there is a split within the party just as much as there's a split within the lobby. It's hard to push that forward unless they sort of resolve that.
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Steven Overly
There's a comment I heard at the summit that to me sort of signals another split among Republicans that I'd be curious to get you to weigh in on. And that was Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania. He was asked about Trump taking a stake in intel and cutting revenue sharing deals with Nvidia and amd. And, and he was not keen on it. Here's what he said.
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Brendan Bordelon
It's a slippery slope. So I think we need to have a lot of care and the way we have to think about it.
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Steven Overly
What's the line in the sand there, Dave?
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Brendan Bordelon
Well, I think the line of the sand is first of all you have to recognize that whatever the party in power does, the next party is going to, you know, there's going to be a precedent set. So you have to live by a set of principles that you'll hold true to regardless of who's in the White House.
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Steven Overly
Anthony, is there a split here, you know, emerging between the Trump administration and business friendly Republicans? And what are you watching for on this front?
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Anthony Adragna
Oh, well, welcome to the last month of my life. Yes, there is definitely a split. There's a quiet split. And what's been really interesting is there are a lot of Republicans that are privately aghast at this decision to take part of Nvidia's chips. To the sales of Nvidia's chips to China, the Trump administration reversed course and is taking a 15% cut of those sales. The decision to take a 10% stake in Intel, a major US tech company, these are things that are anathema to conservative ideology, to what many of these elected officials have talked about for their entire public lives. We were the first to report that Rand Paul publicly was aghast at the decision to take the stake in Intel. But, yeah, it was really notable. I think that, I think Senator McCormick is the epitome of Republicans who are privately uncomfortable with what the Trump administration has done but have been reluctant to weigh in publicly. And so I think it was really notable that we were able to get him on the record to sort of voice concerns, not state outright opposition to what the Trump administration had done, but even to kind of verbalize the ideological opposition to the approach was really notable. And that's something that I had not heard from a lot of these sort of business centric free market Republicans. And we've certainly been trying. So I think that was really notable. We were able to get him on the record on that at the summit.
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Steven Overly
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think, you know, there's a lot of anxiety, I know, in Silicon Valley about what's happening with, with these deals. And, you know, right now, this week, we're getting some sort of framework around TikTok, and who knows what that'll look like. But Trump has signaled in the past that maybe the US Government could have a stake there. So I don't think we're done yet with this debate. And we'll have to see which of those Republicans kind of go from quiet critics to loud critics. Listen, Brendan, Anthony, thanks for being here on Politico Tech.
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Anthony Adragna
Thank you for having us.
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Brendan Bordelon
It was fun.
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Steven Overly
That's all for this week's Politico Tech. The show will be off next week, but I'll be back in your ears with a fresh episode on October 2nd. Until then, please subscribe and recommend the show to a friend or colleague. And for more tech news, subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and Morning Tech. Our producer is Normal Maliko Pram Bandy made our theme music. I'm Stephen Overle. See you back here in two weeks.
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Brendan Bordelon
Ra.