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Politico
25-06-2025
- Business
- Politico
The shifting sands of data privacy law
With help from Aaron Mak In the long absence of any federal rules on data privacy, state after state has stepped into the gap. First was California, whose groundbreaking privacy law went into force in 2020 — followed by 18 other states that passed their own versions. The laws protect online consumers, giving them varying rights to their data and limiting how companies can use it. The tech industry and a host of other businesses have long complained that this is a frustrating patchwork — a hard-to-follow set of rules that make doing business more expensive and less predictable. And now a twist is emerging: Right now, in one capital after another, the patchwork is changing. In recent months, states have been tweaking their privacy laws. Some are trying to catch up with other states in expanding their laws' applicability, while others are scaling back regulations to reduce the headache for businesses. The optimistic argument is that they're all aiming at a 'Goldilocks' zone — a sweet spot reached by trial and error, where consumers are protected and businesses aren't too limited in what they can do with customer data. 'People make better bills than me after I've passed mine, and I want that. I want ours to get stronger from other states,' Montana state Sen. Daniel Zolnikov (R), the lawmaker behind the state's 2023 privacy law, told Digital Future Daily. But to critics, it's just another example of why the state-level approach is so problematic — and it adds fuel to their argument that Washington needs to pass some kind of law that overrides the others and creates a consistent standard. 'The Goldilocks comparison is very accurate,' the tech industry group NetChoice's director of state and federal affairs, Amy Bos, said in a statement. 'But if anything, it emphasizes the serious need to pass a federal law that preempts this massive patchwork for consumers.' The quick pace of technology's advances means state lawmakers have felt the need to amend even new laws. Less than a year after Montana's privacy law went into effect, state legislators amended its regulations to provide stronger protections for teens online. Already, in the 2025 legislative session, six out of 19 states have passed amendments to their data privacy laws. In March, Utah updated its law to allow people to correct inaccurate information collected and sold by companies, and added stronger enforcement capabilities. Oregon also tightened its rules in May, outlawing the sale of precise location data and children's data. (Not all of them have been successful: Virginia lawmakers proposed five bills to amend the state's privacy law, all of which were shot down.) 'It's not about legislating for the sake of legislating, but the reality is that technology is evolving so quickly that we have to stay adaptable,' said Republican state Rep. Doug Fiefia, a lawmaker behind Utah's update. California went the other way. The largest state has the most experience as the earliest adopter of data privacy regulations — and has gotten the most attention, as both a huge market and the tech industry's home turf. Complaints from businesses and a warning from California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) led the California Privacy Protection Agency to narrow the rules it proposed for automated decision-making technology. 'At recent Board meetings, several Board Members emphasized the importance of balancing strong privacy protections with practical implementation,' the CPPA's Executive Director Tom Kemp said in a statement. 'That's why public comment remains such a critical part of the rulemaking process.' For an industry worried about the challenges of a shifting landscape, there's an obvious solution: A federal data privacy law that preempts the state versions. Such a law would have many advantages for the industry: It would create a single national standard for companies to follow, and given the slow pace of change in Congress, it would be unlikely to get constant updates. (It also would create a single point of influence for lobbyists.) So far, the most recent attempts at a federal law have died — first in 2022 when Democrats controlled the House, and then in 2024 with a Republican House majority. While privacy legislation is a bipartisan effort, both attempts fell apart after Democrats opposed preempting state laws and Republicans balked at civil rights protections for automated decisionmaking tools. But the patchwork scenario has created some optimism for the long-frustrated proponents of a federal privacy law, who now see at least a partly open window to go back at the issue in late 2025. Meanwhile, experts anticipate that states will keep tweaking their data privacy laws, whether it's to align with what's working in other states or to address new harms from developing technology. Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, the International Association of Privacy Professionals' managing director in D.C., summed up the state of play: 'Will the privacy Goldilocks ever be satisfied? Probably not, but I think that's by design.' AI chatbots promote China's talking points Some of the most popular AI chatbots may be biased toward China, according to a report published Wednesday by the American Security Project. The group found that ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Grok produced information biased toward the Chinese Communist Party on topics Beijing finds controversial, particularly when delivering responses in simplified Chinese. Multiple models seemed to offer sanitized summaries of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, omitting the fact that the Chinese military killed civilians and referring to the event merely as an 'incident' or 'clash.' The models showed varying levels of bias on issues like human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, COVID-19's early circulation in Wuhan, and China's territorial disputes over Taiwan and other nearby islands. The American Security Project suggests that these responses may be the result of China's concerted efforts to proliferate its narratives on the internet. The report asserts that CCP agents impersonate foreign citizens to disseminate content in dozens of languages online, which state-controlled media, databases, and propaganda agencies then boost to maximize visibility and up their chances of getting into the datasets used for training AI models. Microsoft did not reply to a POLITICO request for comment. OpenAI, Google and xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anthropic scores a copyright win A San Francisco federal court ruled on Tuesday that Anthropic didn't infringe on copyrights by training its AI models on published books, even without the authors' consent. U.S. District Judge William Alsup in the Northern District of California determined that using the books to train its Claude chatbot fell within the fair use exception, a defense allowing for limited portions of copyrighted works to be used in certain contexts. Importantly, Alsup found that Anthropic's use of the books was transformative, meaning that the derivative product has a new meaning or expression from the original work. He wrote that the purpose of Claude was not to replicate the books, but rather to 'turn a hard corner and create something different.' As POLITICO's Morning Tech reported, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and the Chamber of Progress were delighted by the ruling. However, Anthropic will still face a trial over allegations in the suit that it knowingly acquired and used pirated books. This is one of the first major rulings finding that training AI on copyrighted works is considered fair use. In February, a Delaware federal court determined that the fair use defense did not apply to AI models trained on Thomson Reuters content. Similar cases have been brought against OpenAI and Microsoft. post of the day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Aaron Mak (amak@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@
Politico
03-03-2025
- Automotive
- Politico
Digital Future Daily Special Edition: Introducing ‘California Decoded'
Presented by Hello Digital Future Daily readers! Below is the very first edition of POLITICO Pro Technology: California Decoded from our colleagues on the West Coast. We thought you would enjoy a one-day preview of their new daily newsletter. If you like what you read, you can subscribe here. QUICK FIX — The lawmaker spearheading a major AI safety effort tells us why he's feeling confident this year. — Exclusive interview with California AG Rob Bonta reveals his thinking on Trump's tech crusade. — What a major tech lobby group is eyeing in Sacramento this year. Hello and welcome to the first edition of California Decoded, the flagship daily newsletter from POLITICO's brand-new California tech team. I'm Chase DiFeliciantonio, your anchor for today, bringing you the latest from the AI and automation beat, which will be my main focus. My partner Tyler Katzenberger will be bringing you all things tech policy, from social media to privacy debates. We'll announce the final member of our team, who will cover Silicon Valley politics, tomorrow. Glad you're with us. Send feedback, tips and story ideas to chasedf@ and tkatzenberger@ Driving the day ANALYSIS: AI SAFETY IS BACK — A marquee AI safety bill loathed by Big Tech, lauded by Elon Musk and slammed by leading congressional Democrats including Rep. Nancy Pelosi is back in Sacramento. The measure from state Sen. Scott Wiener is one to watch not just because of the controversy it generated last time around, but also for what its slimmed-down look says about who gets to regulate AI in the Golden State, and beyond. Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat widely believed to have his eye on Pelosi's seat when she retires, relaunched the bill Friday after the failure of the notorious, at least in tech circles, measure known as SB 1047 last year. But the battle lines have been redrawn with the retooled proposal, which for now is a far cry from the sweeping effort that generated headlines and a Big Tech backlash. If Wiener wants to succeed this time, he will have to avoid a veto from Gov. Gavin Newsom, which felled his previous measure, and placate a governor who has shown little appetite for regulatory broadsides against one of California's most-profitable industries. He will also have to convince and cajole Big Tech players like Meta to OpenAI to hold their fire, something he tried mightily — and ultimately failed to do — before. Wiener appears to be taking a page out of the tech playbook of failing fast, resurrecting two key ideas from last year in the new bill to expand whistleblower protections for AI workers and to build out public computing resources for AI research. 'I would be very surprised if the bill drew meaningful opposition from tech,' Wiener told California Decoded on Friday after the bill language was first released. 'But I've been surprised before.' His revamped approach says plenty about who will be holding the reins in the effort to prevent runaway AI programs from using too much electricity or, as the naysayers fear, killing us all. Here's a look at the key players Wiener faces with his latest effort on AI: Musk: A long-time AI doomer, Musk somewhat grudgingly supported Wiener's prior bill focused on pre-release testing of AI models in a surprise post last year. He did not put muscle or money behind his position, however. And with the new bill focused on making it easier for AI developers to sound the alarm from within their companies, it's difficult to see Musk — who has shown himself to be no fan of whistleblowing and press leaks at Tesla — coming down on Wiener's side again. Newsom: The California governor not only vetoed Wiener's SB 1047, but also charted an alternative path by appointing a who's who of AI and legal experts to produce a report on how to best handle the safety risks posed by the technology. That writeup is expected imminently, within this first quarter of 2025. Wiener told California Decoded he hasn't been privy to the group's work, but is open to expanding his bill to include the panel's recommendations. That puts him more in the waiting room than the driver's seat with a smaller and more-focused measure potentially awaiting the input of Great Minds like Stanford's Fei-Fei Li, whose oft-repeated moniker, The Godmother of AI, carries weight. Democrats in Congress: Although Pelosi came out against Wiener's prior proposal, whether she supports the slimmed-down version, or takes notice at all, remains to be seen. That intra-party scuffle was back when President Joe Biden was leading the White House instead of Musk — I mean, President Donald Trump. Under Biden, executive actions and Kumbaya international AI safety meetings were the order of the day. With Democrats firmly out of power in Washington, those in the party might be more inclined to notch wins on a key tech policy issue wherever else they can find them. Big Tech: Last year, AI model makers OpenAI and Meta opposed Wiener's more-sweeping measure, which drew some tepid support from Anthropic, the San Francisco maker of the Claude chatbot. Wiener is betting the new bill will draw less wrath from tech companies by focusing on whistleblower protections instead of the expansive vetting regime of the previous bill. It's too early to know whether that happens, but we figured we'd ask anyway. Anthropic declined to comment to California Decoded when asked about the bill, and OpenAI did not respond to questions. A representative for the San Francisco startup incubator Y Combinator, which opposed the previous version of the bill, similarly could not be reached for comment. Among the Big Tech players last year, Meta strenuously opposed the bill, saying its testing rules created too much liability for startups using its free AI programs and hosting events to whip up opposition among Bay Area tech types. Meta spokesperson Jamie Radice told California Decoded that the company is reviewing the legislation. It's not uncommon for industry to take their time reading through the legalese of a new bill before taking a side — or not. Wiener said stripping out the testing provisions should allay much of the opposition. But replacing them with whistleblower protections is not a total olive branch in a tech industry where leaks can be tantamount to corporate treason that can cost significant cash and reputation loss. None of the companies contacted by California Decoded gave a flat 'no,' however, meaning tech still could come into the fold this time. HAPPENING TODAY 3:30 p.m. PT — The California Assembly's Banking and Finance Committee will meet, including to hear testimony on Republican Assemblymember Phillip Chen's bill aimed at saving cryptocurrency traders thousands of dollars on state-imposed licensing costs. In the Courts EXCLUSIVE: BONTA'S TECH PLAYBOOK — California Attorney General Rob Bonta isn't losing sleep over Trump and Big Tech's crusade against strict AI rules and data privacy protections, he told California Decoded in an exclusive, in-person interview today just hours before our launch. It comes as Trump wages a pressure campaign against tech rules in Europe, whose approach often inspires California legislation. 'We expect that maybe Trump will want to sue. Maybe he won't. No idea,' he told us when asked whether the president might expand his pressure campaign to California. 'We'll take him to court ... and as we usually do, we presume we have a high likelihood of success.' The Trump administration has threatened tariffs in response to European taxes and fines on U.S. tech firms, with FCC boss Brendan Carr today lashing out at what he called Europe's social media 'censorship.' Heard that line before? Us too. Tech industry groups — including Musk's X — have filed a string of lawsuits arguing California's social media and AI deepfake regulations violate the First Amendment. Trump hasn't implicated California, but both he and Musk have regularly made the state's left-leaning policies a political punching bag. Bonta told us his office isn't waiting for Trump to pull the trigger. 'The laws that we engage on — either we sponsor or that we provide technical assistance on — we're doing deeper dives on all of those,' he said. 'We know the playbook.' Influence & Industry GOLD RUSH — The liberal, pro-tech interest group Chamber of Progress is watching Golden State lawmakers like a hawk this year after opposing some of the state's most ambitious efforts to regulate social media and AI regulations last year. CEO Adam Kovacevich shared a rundown today of the group's top legislative fights in statehouses, and Sacramento features prominently. Atop the watchlist are proposals to mandate warning labels on social media platforms, including Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan's AB 56, which would force platforms to display unskippable, 90-second health warnings to users at least once per day. Bauer-Kahan also made the Chamber's shortlist for her first-in-the-nation bid to stop tech companies from undercutting Hollywood creatives by using copyrighted works to train AI models without prior consent. Kovacevich said the Chamber of Progress is monitoring scaled-back versions of legislation that failed last session, including Wiener's revived AI safety effort and Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry's third try at sticking human safety operators behind the wheel of some autonomous delivery vehicles. Byte Sized — Apple is reportedly struggling to keep up in the AI race, despite a partnership with OpenAI (Bloomberg) — Anthropic is now valued at $61.5 billion (CNBC) — Alongside California, lawmakers in other states like Texas are grappling with energy demand for data centers (E&E News) — John Bostic, who prosecuted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, says her case is a reminder to Silicon Valley to be cautious and honest about new technologies (Mercury News) With help from Nicole Norman Have a tip, event or AI chatbot prompt to send us? Do reach out: Emma Anderson, California tech editor; Chase DiFeliciantonio, AI and automation reporter; and Tyler Katzenberger, Sacramento tech reporter.
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The family-values right takes on Musk's family
Elon Musk's unusual family, with a claimed 13th child now with four different mothers, has become the target tor a handful of conservative family-values commentators online — raising the prospect of a tech-vs.-religious right rift in 2025's powerful Republican coalition. Dropping an as yet unverified Valentine's Day bombshell, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair claimed last Friday to be the mother of Elon Musk's 13th child. Perhaps more surprising than her claim (which Musk hasn't directly commented on), however, was the opprobrium it generated — not from Musk's sworn enemies among Democrats, but from his newfound allies on the right. 'I strongly recommend having a baby daddy who lives in your house, so that you don't have to tweet him,' wrote conservative author Bethany Mandel. Jon Root, a sports announcer and former Turning Point USA employee, wrote that the episode reflected how '[m]uch of conservatism is filled with godless hypocrites who couldn't care less about conserving traditional family values.' And Matthew Schmitz, editor of Compact magazine, wrote that Musk represents 'a genetic-determinist right' opposed to 'a more culturist right that insists on the importance of marriage and monogamy.' Schmitz gets straight to the heart of an uncomfortable tension within the new Trump coalition. Musk — who hopes to make humanity an interplanetary species, whose Neuralink aspires to integrate our brains with computers, who has employed assisted fertility technologies to father most of his children — represents a 'transhumanist' strain of thought ascendent in Silicon Valley, one that sees humans and machines as equal and inevitably integrated, and in stark contrast to the religious vision that's traditionally propped up Republican politics. Politically, this highlights just how different the Trump 2.0 coalition looks from that which powered his first presidency. CEOs of Big Tech platforms, largely seen as Democratic-leaning during his first campaign and administration, lined up to support his inauguration this time. And in place of the traditional conservatism of former Vice President Mike Pence, there's Vice President JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who has publicly defended Musk. Now, the weird politics of a certain corner of Silicon Valley threaten to upend this fragile balance. This first appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO's afternoon newsletter about how tech and power are shaping our world. Subscribe here. Alexander Thomas, a researcher at the University of East London and author of 'The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism,' described Musk's vision as similar to that of 'longtermist' thinkers like Nick Bostrom, who popularized the concept of artificial 'superintelligence': that from a utilitarian perspective, it's not just personally gratifying, but Musk's duty to the human race to ensure that his superior genes perpetuate throughout human history. 'This means the 8 billion people alive today simply don't matter — genocide and wars are mere ripples, as long as some survive, and Musk is the one that needs to survive,' Thomas told DFD. 'He's the one that needs to pass on the baton of civilization and create this superior future.' On one hand, such a grandiose belief is a convenient rationalization for whatever radical endeavor — from Mars colonization to the possibly extrajudicial deconstruction of the administrative state — a mogul like Musk decides to take up during his lifespan. But it's also a sincerely held, growing belief in Silicon Valley that powers many of its most prominent thinkers — including Sam Altman of OpenAI, who has repeatedly boasted that his company is building a civilization-shifting 'superintelligence' that can surpass human capability. When it comes to Washington politics and the Republican Party, less important here are the internecine (and often deeply bizarre) arguments over the transhumanist future than how it differs from that imagined by the rest of the conservative coalition. Compact's Schmitz, previously an editor of the religious magazine First Things, called Musk's ideology 'quasi-eugenic' and accused his supporters of hypocrisy, writing on X: 'According to this view, when Elon Musk impregnates woman after woman with no intention of giving the children a stable family, that's an expression of his great genetics. But when a lower-class man does the exact same thing, it's a patent sign of his bad genes.' This tension runs deeper than people's feelings about Musk. The same 2024 issue of The Lamp, the Catholic intellectual magazine where Vance recounted his conversion experience, featured one essay inveighing against all alteration of the human body from IVF to gender transition, and another more specifically critiquing IVF itself, which Leah Libresco Sargeant described as a 'fairy tale' where the 'cost is larger than they tell you up front.' The biohacking, utilitarian, futuristic ethos of Musk and his Silicon Valley cadre hasn't yet caused a rift with their socially conservative coalition partners. That might be simply because reproductive rights haven't yet been a salient policy issue in the second Trump administration, as it seems more preoccupied with ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine while prosecuting its own battle at home against the Washington bureaucracy. But given Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency's ever-expanding policy portfolio — and how foundational the religious right continues to be to Republican governance — it could be an unavoidable part of the administration's future.
Politico
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Politico
The family-values right takes on Musk's family
Elon Musk's unusual family, with a claimed 13th child now with four different mothers, has become the target tor a handful of conservative family-values commentators online — raising the prospect of a tech-vs.-religious right rift in 2025's powerful Republican coalition. Dropping an as yet unverified Valentine's Day bombshell, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair claimed last Friday to be the mother of Elon Musk's 13th child. Perhaps more surprising than her claim (which Musk hasn't directly commented on), however, was the opprobrium it generated — not from Musk's sworn enemies among Democrats, but from his newfound allies on the right. 'I strongly recommend having a baby daddy who lives in your house, so that you don't have to tweet him,' wrote conservative author Bethany Mandel. Jon Root, a sports announcer and former Turning Point USA employee, wrote that the episode reflected how '[m]uch of conservatism is filled with godless hypocrites who couldn't care less about conserving traditional family values.' And Matthew Schmitz, editor of Compact magazine, wrote that Musk represents 'a genetic-determinist right' opposed to 'a more culturist right that insists on the importance of marriage and monogamy.' Schmitz gets straight to the heart of an uncomfortable tension within the new Trump coalition. Musk — who hopes to make humanity an interplanetary species, whose Neuralink aspires to integrate our brains with computers, who has employed assisted fertility technologies to father most of his children — represents a 'transhumanist' strain of thought ascendent in Silicon Valley, one that sees humans and machines as equal and inevitably integrated, and in stark contrast to the religious vision that's traditionally propped up Republican politics. Politically, this highlights just how different the Trump 2.0 coalition looks from that which powered his first presidency. CEOs of Big Tech platforms, largely seen as Democratic-leaning during his first campaign and administration, lined up to support his inauguration this time. And in place of the traditional conservatism of former Vice President Mike Pence, there's Vice President JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who has publicly defended Musk. Now, the weird politics of a certain corner of Silicon Valley threaten to upend this fragile balance. This first appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO's afternoon newsletter about how tech and power are shaping our world. Subscribe here. Alexander Thomas, a researcher at the University of East London and author of 'The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism,' described Musk's vision as similar to that of 'longtermist' thinkers like Nick Bostrom, who popularized the concept of artificial 'superintelligence': that from a utilitarian perspective, it's not just personally gratifying, but Musk's duty to the human race to ensure that his superior genes perpetuate throughout human history. 'This means the 8 billion people alive today simply don't matter — genocide and wars are mere ripples, as long as some survive, and Musk is the one that needs to survive,' Thomas told DFD. 'He's the one that needs to pass on the baton of civilization and create this superior future.' On one hand, such a grandiose belief is a convenient rationalization for whatever radical endeavor — from Mars colonization to the possibly extrajudicial deconstruction of the administrative state — a mogul like Musk decides to take up during his lifespan. But it's also a sincerely held, growing belief in Silicon Valley that powers many of its most prominent thinkers — including Sam Altman of OpenAI, who has repeatedly boasted that his company is building a civilization-shifting 'superintelligence' that can surpass human capability. When it comes to Washington politics and the Republican Party, less important here are the internecine (and often deeply bizarre) arguments over the transhumanist future than how it differs from that imagined by the rest of the conservative coalition. Compact's Schmitz, previously an editor of the religious magazine First Things, called Musk's ideology 'quasi-eugenic' and accused his supporters of hypocrisy, writing on X: 'According to this view, when Elon Musk impregnates woman after woman with no intention of giving the children a stable family, that's an expression of his great genetics. But when a lower-class man does the exact same thing, it's a patent sign of his bad genes.' This tension runs deeper than people's feelings about Musk. The same 2024 issue of The Lamp, the Catholic intellectual magazine where Vance recounted his conversion experience, featured one essay inveighing against all alteration of the human body from IVF to gender transition, and another more specifically critiquing IVF itself, which Leah Libresco Sargeant described as a 'fairy tale' where the 'cost is larger than they tell you up front.' The biohacking, utilitarian, futuristic ethos of Musk and his Silicon Valley cadre hasn't yet caused a rift with their socially conservative coalition partners. That might be simply because reproductive rights haven't yet been a salient policy issue in the second Trump administration, as it seems more preoccupied with ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine while prosecuting its own battle at home against the Washington bureaucracy. But given Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency's ever-expanding policy portfolio — and how foundational the religious right continues to be to Republican governance — it could be an unavoidable part of the administration's future.
