The current regime in the US has three general constituencies: the MAGA populists, finance/traditional capital, and the tech oligarchs. This is a deeply precarious coalition as their ideologies and values are fundamentally in opposition in many ways. Constant infighting between these groups is very public, like the HB-1 Visa debate, the tariff situation, etc. MAGA populists want to return to the past, and tech oligarchs want to accelerate into a future that is owned entirely by themselves. Trump has let these tech oligarchs, especially Elon Musk, do some horrifying shit very publically, but seems to only be in it for the money.
To some extent, it seems that Trump doesn’t know anything about tech. I repeat the phrase ‘everything is computer’ from the Tesla ad at the white house all the time, but it is clear that the tech folks are not a group of people he really vibes with much. The cash is good, but Trump seems way more comfortable riffing on trade deficits in front of a crowd, and those crowds increasingly hate big tech.
This personal preference has seemed to play out in recent policy. There has been some real substantive action against big tech from the Trump administration. The FTC and DOJ have continued all the cases against big tech companies that were underway during the Biden administration, including two against Google and one against Meta. Depending on the outcome of these cases, the Trump regime could do some real damage to the companies of the tech oligarchs, including the ones that came to his inauguration.
On the flip side, House Republicans have added language into the budget reconciliation bill that would make it illegal for states to “enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems” any time for the next ten years. Because the term ‘artificial intelligence’ doesn’t actually mean anything, this bill, if made law, could be used to argue that anything using an algorithm cannot be regulated for the next ten years, which would be a huge win for big tech. Considering ChatGPT is literally making people have psychotic breaks right now, seems like a bad call.
Recently, the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, was fired. She was a black woman, and despite all the language about DEI, this may have been almost entirely about AI regulation. The US Copyright Office is a part of the Library of Congress, meaning that it was overseen by Hayden. The office released a report in March and stated that copyright holders ought to be allowed to opt out of their content being used to train AI.
This is such a flashpoint because many AI companies have begun to hit a scaling wall. Using ever-larger datasets during training is starting to give diminishing returns. These programs are, in some ways, actually getting worse over time. In their endless ingenuity, American AI companies have responded to this problem by saying that they need an exception to copyright law so that they can just throw more data at the problem.
CEOs like Sam Altman of OpenAI are using the only argument that they have: China. The companies insist that they need this exemption or else “the race for AI is effectively over,” and “America loses, as does the success of democratic AI.” Truly, I would love to be told what is so democratic about AI in the US, especially if there are laws on the books banning any democratic intervention at any level.
In general, US tech companies have been cozying up with the ‘national security’ state, including the military and ICE, for years, but have rapidly accelerated this in the last year or so. Companies like Palantir help militaries murder civilians and are a critical component of the gestapofied ICE under Trump. Even companies like Meta are trying to make themselves into a military contractor despite their cozy relationship with China. Playing both sides is how you get the big bucks, I guess.
Fundamentally, what the tech oligarchs are trying to do is rebrand themselves. They can tell that the public is turning on them, which is beginning to cause a few people in the government to identify them as a viable political punching bag. Figures like Steve Bannon rail against big tech nowadays, and the tech guys are trying to get out of this by turning themselves into defense contractors. It’s bipartisan within the ruling class to be obsessed with endlessly bloated defense budgets; the proposed budget moving through Congress right now gives over 75% of the funding to the military, ICE, or the cops. Branding your tech company as a nationalist murder machine is good politics for the current era, and every tech company would love to gobble up American tax dollars if they can. War machine for the 21st century, here we come.
A few days ago, just after the librarian was fired, the head of the U.S. Copyright Office released a pre-print report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence that suggests that AI companies may need to stop stealing other people's intellectual property. These reports are not legally binding, but in cases where there is little pre-existing legal framework, many courts look to these reports for guidance. The most recent report asserts that using copyrighted works to train AI in many cases may not be considered fair use, but adds a lukewarm tag that “government intervention would be premature at this time.”
The day after this report was released, the head of the US Copyright Office was fired. Many assumed it was Musk trying to dismantle another part of the government that may have dared try to regulate one of his endeavors. And although reporting suggests it is the DOGE folks that instigated these firings, they lost out on the replacements. Mike Davis, a far-right anti-tech crusader and Trump advisor, stated:
“You can say, well, we have to compete with China. No, we don’t have to steal content to compete with China. We don’t have slave labor to compete with China. It’s a bullshit argument. It’s not fair use under the copyright laws to take everyone’s content and have the big tech platforms monetize it. That’s the opposite of fair use. That’s a copyright infringement.”
Since the firings, Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves have been slotted into the Copyright Office, and Todd Blanche has been named the Acting Librarian of Congress. Perkins is a long-time Trump loyalist in the DOJ, Nieves used to work with House member Jim Jordan on Big Tech investigations, and Blanche is currently overseeing one of the Google antitrust cases being run by the DOJ. These people are all MAGA wing and anti-tech. There are some rumblings that some copyright holders that were sick of their shit getting stolen may have stepped in as well. Capital seems to have sided with MAGA in this case, and the tech bros lost out.
This whole ordeal has highlighted the cracks in the Trump coalition, and opposition should drill into those cracks. A majority of Americans don’t trust AI or AI companies, and that is true within the MAGA base as well. Just as republicans constantly hammer into the democrats for all of the reasons that they suck (real or imagined) this line of attack could hurt republicans. Anyone with a political platform should be screaming from the rooftops that republicans want AI to steal their jobs and make it illegal to do anything about it. They should push the republicans on their faux populism and agitate as much as possible. By pushing on these differences in the coalition, opposition could cause enough infighting to slow or stop some of the most harmful policies’ implementation, or, if pushed far enough, to cause the coalition to completely implode.
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