// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
The fight for tech accountability starts now
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Trump is still in office, but the era of gangster tech regulation needs to end.
Trump is still in office, but the era of gangster tech regulation needs to end.
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When Donald Trump began his second term as president, Silicon Valley gratefully embraced moral nihilism. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more collectively donated millions to Trump’s inauguration fund to ensure his favor in a new era of gangster tech regulation. Meta overhauled its content policy to allow calling gay people mentally ill and women property. Elon Musk started throwing Nazi salutes — yes, allegedly, but he would soon be posting nonstop about protecting the white race from extinction, so that’s the most fragile of fig leafs.
As of mere months ago, this was working out pretty well for them. The Trump administration took a mostly hands-off regulatory approach, particularly in the burgeoning field of AI. It decided to simply not enforce a divest-or-ban law against TikTok (something that was originally Trump’s own idea!), leading TikTok to thank Trump by name in its app. A Republican-led Congress was too dysfunctional to pass the tech regulations it did want. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission still pursued some existing Big Tech lawsuits, but the flood of high-profile investigations we saw under the Biden administration — and the first Trump administration — slowed markedly. Musk functionally ran the US government for a few months.
And beyond simple regulatory favors, Trump, once a vituperative critic of Big Tech, became joined at the hip with it. Tech CEOs prominently attended his inauguration, and their companies showered him with ballroom donations and gold gewgaws. The White House hosted the reveal of the Stargate Project, OpenAI’s massive data center plan. The US Army created a special detachment for executives from Meta, Palantir, OpenAI, and Thinking Machines Lab, and Trump tapped tech leaders as advisers. He ordered an entire technology renamed because he thought it would make the AI industry look better, and the industry duly fell in line.