The download on Trump 2.0 and tech
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As we approach President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next month, questions are coming up about how his second administration will deal with tech.
A lot has changed in the industry and its relationship to the former president since his first go-round.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Reed Albergotti, tech editor at the news site Semafor, to help us decode some of the signals. They started with artificial intelligence and the man Trump has named as his AI czar, venture capitalist David Sacks.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Reed Albergotti: I actually don’t think we really know at this point what the AI czar’s responsibilities are. I thought it was really interesting, the announcement of David Sacks focused on freedom of speech and sort of bias in AI chatbots. That’s been an issue that I think people have brought up on the right. I don’t know if that’s the focus. I mean, I would be surprised if the Trump administration is really going after this, you know, Manhattan Project for AI and they want to do these huge infrastructure projects, if the AI czar isn’t going to have some say in that. He’s also, I mean, very close with Elon Musk. And Musk is, as people may know, is building this massive AI data center in Memphis [Tennessee] that is possibly the biggest supercomputer in the world. He has to be thinking about this stuff in sort of that big geopolitical way
Meghan McCarty Carino: When it comes to AI nationalism, trade is also something that comes up a lot, especially for hardware like semiconductors. How might the Trump administration use policy around chips as literally bargaining chips in foreign policy?
Albergotti: There are all these countries now, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, to name a couple that really want to bolster their tech industries, their homegrown tech industries, by getting into this AI race and building massive data centers. I think they see their competitive advantage here being able to provide cheap energy, like the UAE has been building nuclear power plants like nobody’s business. They can, you know, cut red tape, but the Commerce Department has been very hesitant to allow Nvidia and other chipmakers to send their most advanced chips over to these countries, mainly because they’re worried that China has too much access and too much influence there. So these countries have become — and I think you’ll see more of them around the world — sort of these proxy battlefronts in the tech race with China. And it’ll be fascinating to see how the Trump administration plays that. And we just know that, you know, Trump likes to make a deal, and I don’t think he’s going to want to send these things over there without getting something in return. So I’m just really curious to see how he uses those “bargaining chips.”
McCarty Carino: One domain that you write about to keep an eye on is biotech. Can you explain what we might anticipate there?
Albergotti: Right, I mean, biotech is also just another fascinating one because you have maybe [Robert F. Kennedy] Jr. coming in to run the [Food and Drug Administration]. There’s a huge explosion right now in biotech, where there’s so much money going into these attempts to use artificial intelligence to come up with new drugs, and that is going to require some reforms at the FDA. Of course, RFK Jr. has talked about reforms at the FDA, but maybe not the kind that the biotech industry wants to see. I just was actually talking with a biotech investor the other day who said all anybody wants to talk about in these meetings is whether RFK Jr. will basically stop approvals of drugs. So there’s a massive amount of worry. I think it’s totally unpredictable what’s going to happen there, but I think in line with this idea of the Manhattan Project for AI, I would expect Trump to want to push that technology forward. It’s a huge competitive advantage that the U.S. has over China and other countries, and you probably want to see us continue in that area, rather than let it go somewhere else.
McCarty Carino: All right, let’s turn to antitrust. There’s been a lot of antitrust activity in the tech sector during the Biden administration, and crucially, a number of these cases actually started during the first Trump administration. We now know Trump has nominated a sitting member of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, to lead the FTC. So it seems current Chair Lina Khan will be out. There had been some speculation as to whether she might actually remain during the Trump administration. But where does this appointment lead us into the second Trump administration when it comes to antitrust?
Albergotti: I mean, the way I’m looking at it is, you know, there were questions about whether Trump would maybe, sort of, you know, let some of the litigation die on the vine. As you said, he started this, but that was in a different era. And I think the impetus for those cases really had more to do with kind of the way he felt that the tech industry had been going after him, and I don’t think that’s the issue anymore. I don’t think — you see, you know, tech executives really bending over backwards to try to, you know, ingratiate themselves with Trump or work with Trump, but now with these picks, you know, for FTC and antitrust with the [Department of Justice], I think you have to assume that those cases will just continue. I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to pick up or if there will be new cases or accelerate in any way. If I’m the heads or CEOs of these big tech companies, I wouldn’t count on any of those cases [going away]. I’d just count on having to continue to fight just as they did under the Biden administration.
McCarty Carino: So another area of policy that’s not sort of explicitly tech-related, but is very important to the tech industry, is immigration, and specifically skilled immigration, H-1B visas. What are you watching on that front?
Albergotti: Everyone in Silicon Valley really supports more skilled immigration. You hear this. It just seems like it comes up in every tech conference where somebody says, you know, I really think every Ph.D. student should get a green card. I think that’s a very popular point of view. The U.S. tech industry is really bolstered, I mean, so many of the leaders in the industry have come from, you know, places like India, China, other countries. They’re just doing all this breakthrough work here. And I think there’s a real feeling that if the U.S. wants to continue to lead in technology, it’s going to have to really be open to, you know, people coming in from all over the world or continue to be open there. I just can’t see that the Trump administration 2.0 will kind of make some of the mistakes that they made in 1.0, where they really shut a lot of that down. If your goal is to race against China in terms of technology and AI and biotech and all these areas, like you really want to increase that rather than decrease it.
McCarty Carino: Broadly speaking, how would you sort of characterize the difference in tone and approach that we might expect to technology policy in the Trump administration compared to Biden, and to what extent might it be similar?
Albergotti: Well, obviously on the antitrust front, it’s similar. I think in every other front you’re seeing a much more gung-ho, “let’s build” kind of mentality from the Trump administration. And that has, you know, people in Silicon Valley, in certain circles of Silicon Valley — you know, [like] Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist who famously came out in support of Trump — I think really excited. Because I think the Biden administration has been more of a, they’ve had a little bit of more of a cool relationship with tech around antitrust, but also, I think, around AI. They’ve had this AI executive order, which, you know, I don’t think was an anti-AI or anti-technology bill, but there was a lot of worry there about, you know, what is this technology going to mean for society? And I think from Trump, it’s going to be much more like, well, you know, we need to win. This is a race and we need to win. And I think that’s something that resonates with a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now.
