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:

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. Jascha Bareis, a postdoctoral political scientist at the University of Fribourg;
2. Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves, a sociologist of design and technology pursuing a PhD at the Tecnopolítica unit of the Open University of Catalonia;
3. 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.