The Tech Policy Press Podcast

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 the politics driving them, Justin Hendrix spoke to two individuals who covered these matters for Tech Policy Press this summer: Tech Policy Press fellow Chris Mills Rodrigo and audio reporter Laura Karpas, who interned at Tech Policy Press this summer and is currently a graduate student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

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:Alissa Cooper, Executive Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI)Meetali Jain, Executive Director of Tech Justice Law (TJL)Matthew B. Lawrence, Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law

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 of the authors of the piece about what they learned reporting it, and where the story might go next: Eileen Guo, MIT Technology Review senior reporter for features and investigations, and open source investigative reporter Gisela Perez de Acha.

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 implications may be for the complex interaction between political leaders and public opinion.

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:James Ball, a journalist and fellow at Tech Policy Press;Gavin Freeguard, the founder director of a new think tank called State of the Future; andRachel Coldicutt, the founder and executive director of Careful Industries.

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 tested on a benchmark⁠ of cyber capabilities.”To try to better understand these developments and their implications for the US and international debates over AI governance, Justin Hendrix spoke to two individuals who are following the details closely:Vinh Nguyen, a senior fellow for AI at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former chief responsible AI officer and chief data scientist for operations at the National Security Agency (NSA), andGraham Webster, a lecturer and research scholar in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance at Stanford University, where he leads the DigiChina Project.

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 is buying DHS and its component agencies, and what is necessary to reverse the authoritarian trajectory the country is on.

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 and AI Now Institute advisor Frederike Kaltheuner, an author of a three-part series for Tech Policy Press that argues Europe's dependency problem runs deeper than frontier model access, to debate what Europe is actually getting wrong, and what it would take to change course.

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 their way and what should be done about it. Justin Hendrix had the chance to dig into the findings with the report’s authors: Alisa Valentin, broadband policy director at Public Knowledge, and Claudia Ruiz, senior civil rights policy advisor at UnidosUS.

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 Memphis who has covered the xAI story daily from the beginning. He’s attended community meetings and hearings, filed right-to-know requests, parsed the differing interpretations of the Clean Air Act by the EPA, the Shelby County Health Department and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, counted turbines, and spent time with residents living alongside the facilities. The result is a level of detail that few can match.In this conversation, Strebig brings us up to speed on the latest developments — including a newly updated lawsuit citing unpermitted turbines in Southaven, the implications of the SpaceX IPO and the impending IPOs of other AI firms, and the stalled water recycling plant Memphis leaders had counted on. And, he reflects on what it has been like to chase facts as the story spread across two states and a thicket of jurisdictions.

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 move has left many experts baffled. And, it is raising alarms in foreign capitals about the wisdom of relying on American AI, suggesting the US will operate ad hoc, with access to advanced models revoked on a case-by-case basis. Against that backdrop, a group of cybersecurity leaders organized by Alex Stamos has urged the administration to reverse course in an open letter. Currently, Stamos is chief product officer at an AI security startup called Corridor. Previously, he was chief security officer at Facebook, before he left to found the Stanford Internet Observatory. Justin Hendrix caught up with him on Tuesday, June 16.

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 of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age.”

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 the idea that generosity is the hidden infrastructure of the internet, how to expand access to powerful AI tools rather than closing it down for security's sake, how to overcome misaligned incentives to build a better information environment, how to counter surveillance, and why those concerned with AI governance should spend more time thinking about the protocol and harness layers.

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 senior editor Ramsha Jahangir spoke with Nico Schmidt, the journalist behind the Investigate Europe report, and Christiaan van Veen of Leitmotiv, a Dutch research and policy consultancy that has analyzed data center permit filings in the Netherlands.

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 safetWe 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 Technology's Marie Seck, Project SENTIMENT's Joel Baumann, Mozilla's Svea Windwehr, and conference director Barbara Lazarotto.And, you’ll hear two interviews: a conversation with European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski on whether the GDPR needs reform amid the simplification push, and a wide-ranging reflection from CPDP founder Paul De Hert on how the conference and the field of data protection have evolved over nearly two decades, the value of reasoned disagreement, and why Europe should be more self-critical.

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, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, and founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab; and Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, vice president of the Center for Civil Rights and Technology. The conversation touched on the necessity of cultural and narrative work as the foundation for policy work; how to build collective power and alternatives, not just guardrails; and why it is important to focus on the people behind technology and their motivations, not just technology itself.

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 labs. Last year, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in AI. Reed previously worked with Common Sense as a senior tech-policy adviser from 2015 to 2020, and was a lead negotiator on the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act.Justin Hendrix caught up with Reed about how he views the current state of AI and child safety and his goals for the Institute.

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 Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), one of the lawyers representing the plaintiff.

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 Nemitz, who is one of the authors of a new book titled The Open Future and its Enemies: How We Can Protect Free Society from AI Dictatorship. The book argues that three decades of under-regulation have produced the concentrations of wealth and power we now confront, and that the survival of democracy in the digital age will depend on citizens, civil society, and a new generation willing to treat their work as carrying responsibility not just for safety, but for fundamental rights and self-government.

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 doing pro-democracy and pro-human rights work in an increasingly authoritarian world. To learn more about what transpired and what’s next, Justin Hendrix spoke to the head of Access Now, Alejandro Mayoral Baños, and the director of RightsCon, Nikki Gladstone, about their experience, why this moment matters, and what's next for the community they convene.

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 profession and the quality of patient care, but also about how the degradation of healthcare work affects communities.

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 place.

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 American immigration—sitting between the federal government and the states, encoding policy into code, and building infrastructure that increasingly poses a threat to democracy and the rule of law. Guests include:Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham Law School who is also affiliated with the Strauss Center at University of Texas, the Atlantic Council Cyber Statecraft Initiative, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, and the Center for AI and Digital Policy.Sam Adler, a third year law student at Fordham Law School.

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.""Instead of waiting for the crisis and hastily developing insufficient policies, lawmakers should prepare for this anticipated crisis now," he says.

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 the use of AI for lethal autonomous weapons.

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 cable endorsing a specific social media platform for use in its messaging—and doing so in the same document that it encourages collaboration with military psychological operations—would have been nearly unthinkable until recent months. But it’s just the latest in a series of developments that suggest Elon Musk’s X is regarded as the preferred tool of the state. Let’s jump right in.

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: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back, published by Columbia Global Reports. Justin Hendrix interviewed him at Book Culture, a bookstore on 112th Street in New York City.

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 contributions to Tech Policy Press. Guests include:Jascha Bareis, a postdoctoral political scientist at the University of Fribourg;Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves, a sociologist of design and technology pursuing a PhD at the Tecnopolítica unit of the Open University of Catalonia;Marché Arends, a South African independent investigative journalist.

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 law, universities, a free press, and civic life itself. This isn't necessarily because AI is being misused or falling into the wrong hands, they say—in most instances AI is working exactly as intended and, in doing so, eroding the expertise, decision-making structures, and human connection that give institutions their legitimacy.

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 they think about the risk they face for speaking out.

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 convincing by the month.A new report on deepfake financial fraud from Data & Society maps this threat. Justin Hendrix spoke to its authors, including:Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society, andAnya Schiffrin, co-director of the tech policy and innovation concentration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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 battling FBI gag orders that kept Americans in the dark about government data requests, and now for the fight against the grave civil rights and privacy abuses of the Trump administration.Now, as she’s preparing to step down from her role at EFF, she's telling her story, and trying to recruit a new generation to the fight. Her new book, Privacy's Defender, out March 10 from MIT Press, weaves her personal journey with the legal battles she's fought on behalf of whistleblowers, researchers, innovators, and everyday people.

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 what they call the “upgrader’s mindset,” which should be applied whenever “disruptive changes would pose the greatest social risk.”

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, andAmos Toh, senior counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

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 since 2017. Its most recent investigation focuses on TikTok, and what they found raises pointed questions about the platform's creator monetization program. Researchers at Maldita documented a network of hundreds of accounts — spanning eighteen countries — that were producing AI-generated videos of protests that never happened, and doing so not out of any discernible political motive, but to accumulate followers, qualify for TikTok's revenue-sharing program, and, in some cases, sell the accounts outright. In this episode, Justin Hendrix is joined by Maldita associate director for public policy Carlos Hernández-Echevarría and public policy officer Marina Sacristán.

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 writing and teaching about technology and politics for more than two decades. Marichal's new book, You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem: Renegotiating the Socio-Technical Contract, considers the age of recommendation systems and large language models. Drawing on political philosophy, he argues that individuals have entered into an implicit bargain with technology companies, trading unpredictability and novelty for the convenience of algorithmically curated experience. The consequences of that bargain, he contends, reach beyond personal preference and into the foundations of liberal democratic citizenship.

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 Policy Press senior editor Ramsha Jahangir spoke with members of the DSA Observatory, which is organizing the conference, to take stock. What have these first years of enforcement clarified? Where does opacity remain? And what does it mean to conduct DSA research in today’s political climate? Guests include:John Albert, associate researcher, DSA Observatory.Paddy Leerssen, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and part of the DSA Observatory.Magdelena Jozwiak, associate researcher at the DSA Observatory.

A wave of lawsuits in the Unites States is targeting tech firms for their product design decisions. Lawyer Carrie Goldberg has played a role in establishing the product liability theory that underlies them. As the founder of C.A. Goldberg, PLLC, in 2017, her firm brought a lawsuit that sought to apply product liability theory to a tech platform — Herrick v. Grindr — arguing that a dangerous app design, not just user behavior, was the source of harm. In 2022, Goldberg was appointed to the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee in the federal social media multidistrict litigation. She’s led cases against Amazon, Meta, and Omegle, has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on child safety issues, and is the author of Nobody's Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls. Justin Hendrix spoke to her from her offices in Brooklyn about what she's learned over the last decade, and about some ongoing litigation that remains in dispute.

"Operation Metro Surge" — the massive immigration enforcement operation playing out right now in Minnesota — was billed as a targeted effort to apprehend undocumented immigrants. But what it has exposed goes far beyond immigration enforcement. It has pulled back the curtain on a sprawling surveillance apparatus that incorporates artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other novel tools — not just to enable the raids that have turned violent and, in some cases, deadly; but also to silence dissent, to intimidate entire communities, and to discourage people from even watching what masked federal agents are doing in their own neighborhoods.To discuss these events and the prospects for reform, Justin Hendrix spoke to Irna Landrum, a senior campaigner at Kairos Fellowship and author of a recent piece on Tech Policy Press, "How ICE Uses AI to Automate Authoritarianism," and Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, vice president for the Center for Civil Rights and Technology at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which has called for reforms at the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies.