What tech leaders fear (in their own words)

Politico

09-05-2025

Presented by
With help from Derek Robertson
This week's Milken Institute Global Conference gathered top players in business, technology and politics at a chaotic moment for the global business ecosystem. POLITICO's Tyler Katzenberger was on the ground to take it all in, and over the course of the week he cornered some big names in industry and government to ask them the question on everyone's mind: What's the biggest threat to the future for tech?
Their answers have been edited and condensed.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy
The biggest threat is complacency. I think when it comes to emerging technology, some people think that it's almost like a movie. You can sit back and someone will make the next discovery. The next great model will suddenly just be announced. The reality is that everyone in the innovation ecosystem — from universities to industry to the government — all have a very important role to play in driving innovation forward. That was a big thesis in this speech I gave in Austin a few weeks ago, and it's going to continue to be important. It's an important choice we make as a nation, to drive as a nation home.
I think the U.S. is very much ahead in AI. If you think about the core components of the AI stack, which is essentially chips, algorithms and applications, we lead on all three. We have the best chips in the world with Nvidia. We have the best models in the world, and we're building leading-edge applications that our industry and government are using. That doesn't mean that we don't have adversaries working very hard to catch up with us.
Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)
We're trying to prevent California from balkanizing copyright. Copyright is, in fact, a constitutional issue. It does not belong to the states, and never should belong to the states. During the first Trump administration, we finally clawed back and standardized copyright relative to musical creations, songs and recordings for artists.
So, yeah, it's one of those strange things where the hubris of the states thinking that they have any part of it — they don't. Nothing in the Constitution envisioned that states would have different copyrights or patents, or even trademarks in the true sense.
The United States federal government is supposed to set up for commerce purposes, the law of the land. And for California, when there's a federal law and they're always adding onto it so that there's a balkanized 49 states and California, and they're two separate entities, it's not productive, it's bad. It's the same as how our gas prices are artificially more than a dollar higher in California, because California has to have yet another standard even there.
Judy Faulkner, CEO and founder of health-data giant Epic Systems
I didn't say this on stage because there's a lot of private equity in the audience here. But what I'm hearing from our customers is that private equity is very scary, because what private equity does is it buys them, then gets rid of all sorts of things that private equity thinks is too expensive, leaving them as just a husk. Then it sells these companies and makes a profit, but they're then in too terrible shape to do good health care.
That's what I've heard health systems say to me. I certainly don't have personal experience, but just the other day a physician CEO told me that he spoke to other health systems who had gone with private equity, and he said none of them have worked that well.
Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer of AI firm Perplexity
I think the thing that would help the most is how do we make San Francisco a safer, more livable city so that we can keep attracting the world's best engineering and AI talent to work there?
There's a lot of talent that doesn't want to work out of the city, so we had to open up a Palo Alto office. And there's definitely talent that is hesitant to relocate to San Francisco because of issues … like public safety, livability and homelessness.
Ryan Hagemann, IBM's global lead for AI policy
I'm not sure I would quite frame this as a threat, but a big concern of ours … is a lack of some sort of harmonized framework or approach to governing AI domestically in the United States.
There's the emergence of a lot of these state bills, some of which we're positively inclined towards, some of which we are less inclined towards. The reality is that if we have to start looking at every single state in which we operate, and they all have different rules and regulations around the development of AI at an early stage, then that does start to make the geographic consideration of where investment dollars and job creation goes a lot more poignant. What we're ultimately looking for, like most market actors, is certainty. Whatever that certainty is, it could be good, it could be bad, but we want there to be some degree of legal certainty there.
vc to the rescue?
A prominent venture capitalist is pushing back on the Trump administration's cuts to research — and putting their money where their mouth is.
Lux Capital, founded by Josh Wolfe, announced it was committing at least$100 million to 'support American scientists facing funding cuts.' Lux said it would offer scientists money and advice for challenges from grants getting cut to visas not getting renewed.
In a blog post Lux pitched the project as a riposte to China, whose '2035 Science & Technology Vision' lays out massive subsidies for research of the exact kind the Trump administration's budget raiders have been slashing.
'American scientists––and those we attract to America🇺🇸––are what have helped make America not just great but absolutely + relatively EXCEPTIONAL,' Wolfe wrote on X. 'We CANNOT cede scientific supremacy to China.'
slater vs. big tech (and, maybe, trump)
A key Trump administration official could kick off a new era of tech regulation.
In POLITICO Magazine, Nancy Scola profiled Gail Slater, Trump's assistant attorney general for antitrust, who wants to end perceived conservative 'censorship' by breaking up Big Tech — if the president who appointed her can stay out of the way.
'I think a big challenge for Gail is, how impulsive will the president be?' William Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission who once worked with Slater, told Nancy. 'You can't say, 'My God, shut up,' because then you're fired. So you cross your fingers and hope you're not a target.'
Judges otherwise inclined to hear Slater's arguments that tech companies have overly consolidated power might, in the face of one of Trump's frequent personalized screeds, throw them out as an improper use of the Justice Department to punish personal enemies. That means Slater will have to walk a fine line to carry out her mission.
'The pitch you're making to the court,' Kovacic said, 'is, 'you can trust us because we're experts using good technical judgment. We're using our best professional judgment.'' Judges, he said, 'are not going to defer to extortion, to political pressure.'
national space council returns
The Trump administration will bring back the National Space Council, a policy body that could boost its ambitious space goals — and possibly counterbalance Elon Musk's influence.
POLITICO's Sam Skove reported on the move today, which an anonymous White House official confirmed. For months, experts have worried that Elon Musk's opposition would doom the National Space Council, which by law is chaired by the vice president.
The office was unstaffed from 1993 to 2017. Trump then revived it during his first term, but it mostly lay dormant again during President Joe Biden's administration.
The council develops space policy and keeps agencies with space portfolios on task, which will be no small feat considering the administration's goals of building a space-based missile shield, beating China to another moon landing, putting astronauts on Mars and further integrating the public and private space sectors.
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Stay in touch with the whole team: Mohar Chatterjee ([e-mail]); Steve Heuser ([e-mail]); Nate Robson ([e-mail]); and Daniella Cheslow ([e-mail]).