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Protesters march outside the South by Southwest festival in London on June 4, 2026, opposing a planned data center development at Brick Lane in east London. The demonstration was part of a series of actions organized by the “Stop Dirty Data Centres” campaign, which is holding Europe-wide days of action this weekend involving more than 100 groups across 15 countries. (Global Action Plan)

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Primitive Accumulation by Daniela Zampieri / 

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Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

This month, the European Commission is marking 

, bringing together policymakers, industry and researchers to showcase how AI can strengthen Europe’s competitiveness across industries and public services. Europe says it needs more data centers to power those ambitions, yet their rapid expansion is raising questions about energy, water, labor conditions and who gets a say in where they are built. 

To learn more, I spoke first with three of the organizers behind 

 across 15 European countries, where more than 100 groups are calling for a moratorium on new projects: 

I then turned to two journalists investigating the industry: 

of Investigate Europe, whose reporting with Tech Policy Press 

 of Lighthouse Reports, which has filed a 

 under the Aarhus Convention over EU secrecy about data centers’ environmental costs. We talked about who gets to shape Europe’s digital future, who pays for it and who holds the industry accountable.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

This month, the European Commission is marking European AI Innovation Month, bringing together policymakers, industry and researchers to showcase how AI can strengthen Europe's competitiveness. But Europe's AI ambitions require infrastructure and the rapid expansion of data centers is raising questions about energy and water use, as well as environmental costs and the impact on local communities. This weekend, more than 100 groups across 15 European countries are mobilizing against large scale data center development, calling for a moratorium on new AI projects. I spoke to the campaigners and protest organizers about what's driving these protests, what campaigners want to change, and who gets to decide Europe's digital future.

My name is Rosi Leonard. I work as the data center campaign lead in Friends of the Earth, Ireland, and I am based in Dublin.

My name's Owen Espley. I'm the community campaigns manager at Global Action Plan, working with communities facing data centers. And I'm also playing a role coordinating stopdirtydatacentres.eu.

I am Aurora Gómez from Tu Nube Seca Mi Rio, which means your cloud dries my river. We are a Spanish data center resistance, and we are also part of the Spanish coordination of the campaign of the moratorium.

Thank you so much, wonderful group. And I just want to appreciate first that you are joining us a day ahead of the protests starting across Europe, so busy times, and I really appreciate your time and space for Tech Policy Press. Maybe we could start a little bit by introducing what Stop EU Data Centers is to our global listeners and how did you come about it?

So Stop.dataCenters.EU is a large coalition now with over 103 different organizations supporting us from 16 countries across Europe, planning currently 85 actions across Europe and counting. It's a movement of civil society groups, digital rights groups, and especially communities facing data centers who are coming together onto the European political stage to demand a moratorium. And so groups are facing data centers in lots of different contexts and different national spaces where the politics of what's happening vary, but groups in all the different levels and across different countries have called said that a moratorium is what we need to put halt to the development of large scale data centers so that we can have the democratic debate that we need to consider the huge environmental, energy, water, social impact of data centers. And so really it's a day for those groups to come and step proudly onto the European political scene and say, "We are here and now we're ready to be a force to be reckoned with and politicians need to listen and hear our call for a moratorium."

And generally what we've seen so far in Europe, momentum has been slow, at least at the public level, especially when we compare it to what's happening outside Europe, specifically in the United States. Was it challenging to mobilize people on the ground and what are the type of communities that are coming together for this effort?

For us, take us a lot of time to create the community and awareness. We have been traveling around Spain for four years in a very tiny places where they are facing the problematics, not only with the data centers, but also the mineral destruction that are going with data centers and the macro energetic problems related with data centers. So finally, these people are having this conversation, these rural communities are having this conversation. And in the cities, they're having the conversation about AI and we are able to bring these two worlds together in only one conversation together. So for us, it has been a long time to do that. So it's when you want to be an agriculture and you have this lamp and you have to put the seeds and wait until it's the proper momentum. I think right now in Europe is the proper momentum to do that.

Yeah, I would really agree with what Aurora said. So in Ireland, our context is kind of interesting because in Ireland right now, 23% of electricity goes to data centers, which is really, really high. And it's been much higher than in a lot of other European countries also like states in the United States for many years. And there have been waves of calls for a moratorium in Ireland. But I think in the last year and a half, there have been a lot of new proposals for data centers that are coming in, like Aurora said, across the island, also at a time of really rising electricity bills and a real need, I think a real sense of urgency for people to ask why is this happening so fast? Why is this industry developing so fast at such a massive scale in Ireland when there are still so many issues around say energy poverty, around electricity bills being very high, around fossil gas lock-in?

We have in Ireland a really worrying project happening in the west of Ireland where there is plans for an LNG terminal to import frack gas from the states. It's being proposed by government, which has been really unpopular and really worrying because fracking is actually banned in Ireland. So there is this kind of question over who is benefiting from this development? How is it affecting our bills? How is it affecting fossil gas lock-in? And I think that what we've seen in the last year is communities in areas where data centers are being built are getting a lot more organized than they might have been previously before. And I think that is really making people pay attention because they are very credible local voices who are really worried about the impact on local electricity constraints, on emissions, on electricity prices, like I said. So it has brought the issue to a new level and the organization has been fundamental to that because previously I think it was isolated individuals, possibly smaller communities making planning applications, but now the organization is much stronger and that's really, really brilliant.

And I think what's really important about this linking in on a wider European level is one of the questions that we often get asked in Ireland by people who want the industry to keep growing here is they say, "Well, if you have a moratorium in Ireland, you just want it to move elsewhere. You just want the data centers to move to Spain." And what we're able to say now is actually no, we need a much stronger pause. The EU is talking about tripling data center capacity. It's going to cost us a lot of money. It's going to lock in a lot of fossil fuels. Communities across Europe are saying the same things in different places and that's really, really powerful because it is ultimately saying, look, who is benefiting from this? Is it going to be a small amount of American multinationals or is it going to be people on the ground?

So I think the context in England and Wales and the UK has been quite different because say maybe a year ago you had one or two small community groups, particularly those in the Greenbelt area who were facing data centers and they were the ones getting some profile from it. But over the last year as it's been clear that the huge scale of the data centers that we're seeing being proposed, hundreds of them that would require potentially tripling, doubling or tripling the UK's entire electricity supply, and we've been having forcing that debate into the media, communities in inner cities, communities in post-industrial areas are joining those in rural areas to say that they're not happy about this and they're fighting at the bit. And this summer has seen a kind of quite rapid transformation of data center activism taking place. The phone has been ringing off the hook with groups saying, "We've just found out about a new proposal down our road and we're not very happy about it.

How do we organize and fight it?" All the communities have been saying, "I've just been reading about data centers and didn't realize that our council has been signing off deals and approving data centers that we had no idea were happening and we're very worried about the consequences." And there's been an absolute groundswell of communities saying, "Wait a sec, these politicians have been saying they're going to build these data centers and they've not been having the conversation with us about the consequences. Where's the democracy here? Where's they've been putting in freedom of information requests and finding out that councilors have had information that's been withheld from the communities?" And they're absolutely up in arms about it at this moment and ready to come together and fight. And the groups vary and they have slightly different perspectives. The concerns of a post-industrial community are going to be slightly different from a rural one, are going to be slightly different from an inner city community.

But they're all aghast that these decisions are being taken and imposed on them without their participation and in often many cases in opposition to what the community says they want.

It's interesting because big platforms and companies building data centers have also made community engagement a big part of their public strategy. We're seeing them hiring community focused positions and just having a lot of engagement and building things at a very local level to help communities. So it's very ironic, but I'm also curious from a policy perspective and in concrete terms, what role can local communities play in decisions around planning or building data centers? And is there a way that they can meaningfully object to a project?

Yeah, I think there's loads of ways. I think one of the things we're seeing in Ireland is, like Owen said, a lot of the, I suppose, tactics of the industry have been to hide impacts and to try and get in with decision makers before any level of democratic planning happens. And I think what we're really seeing in Ireland is that is now changing where there is a lot of pressure on the government to enforce more transparency requirements at a minimum. At a minimum, transparency requirements are needed. So that is shifting the balance of power a little bit where I think that there is no longer this idea that companies can submit a planning application that has very little detail, that is very poorly put together, and everyone else has to figure out how it interacts with climate law, how it interacts with electricity prices, how it interacts with potentially local water shortages or anything like that.

So I think at a very local level, that kind of power building amongst communities is impacting on politicians. It's definitely having an impact on government politicians in Ireland who would be fairly sympathetic and enabling of the tech sector in Ireland. So I think that's very, very strong. I think it's also moving into a very interesting space where we want a moratorium, but we want a moratorium so that we can put in place more sustainable guidelines so we can actually put the ball back in our court, take the power back and say, "These are the terms under which we think more private data centers are acceptable given the current context, given the current challenges, given the need to tackle climate breakdown." So I think that's very powerful in the influence it's having. And then there's another aspect of it that I think is quite interesting, which is tech worker organizing I think is gaining momentum as well.

And that is putting additional pressure in terms of an industrial strategy to say, again, the corporate power that these companies hold, we don't necessarily agree that they need to be carrying out these mass layoffs that we're seeing. We're seeing a lot of layoffs in Ireland in the tech sector. And workers in a lot of instances are directly relating that to companies expending so much capital on data centers and trying to go in hard on generative AI as a sort of almost like a disciplining tool of workers that they're not going to benefit from. So there's sort of a very interesting moment I think for mutual power building between communities and tech workers in the sense of pushing decision makers to say this industry has developed at such speed and at such scale with so little safeguards for a very long time that it is no longer legitimate for you to keep pushing it this way.

You have to now recognize this as an electoral issue and as a worker's issue.

We're also having this conversation and the moment you mentioned during what the European Commission is calling the European Innovation Month, and there's a lot of push for AI adoption across European industry and also public services. Just today there was reporting around EU encouraging AI support in lawmaking and policymaking as well. So how do you respond to that moment at the time that you're pushing back against building more?

And for example, one of the communities that are raising up against data centers are Mora de Lebre, that is an project coming from the European Union. So when we are talking about that we want sovereignty, digital sovereignty, we want data sovereignty as we though that food sovereignty. We want to have the minimal needs that we need, but also with social justice, we want to create sacrifice zones in some places that are less powerful or put in these minds of critical minerals in some regions. And for example, we have this battle right now in Spain because we are trying to approve, Spanish government is trying to approve a real decree that around data center that is not an out, but at least is some kind of regulation and the starting point of have some regulation on data centers before the election. But what happened that the European Union says yesterday that we cannot approve the royal decree because it has to go before to them.

So what I understand from my individual point of view is that the tech lobbies are really powerful in the European Union and they're trying to push against any kind of regulation in any kind of country. So we need to be smarter. We need to be farther and we don't want to have this narrative of sovereignty in European Union without looking for social justice. We have to looking for another kind of narratives that everyone can be safer and have our communities keep going without these kind of language in our place.

Yeah, I think that point around sovereignty is so important. We hear that a lot in Ireland. And then I think what's so funny about it for me is we hear this idea of EU tech sovereignty, but when we look into what's actually being built and proposed in Ireland in terms of data centers, it is either the same names, it's the Amazons, it's Google, it's the big American companies building the data centers directly, or it's big co-locator providers building data centers that it then turns out in many cases they are leasing to say Amazon or TikTok. So again, it's really poorly defined, I think, as Aurora mentioned, what does sovereignty actually mean? How much compute is needed? Where is the figure of this tripling of data center capacity? Where does it come from? In Ireland, the energy regulator carried out what they called a market intelligence exercise when they were writing their recent connection policy for data centers last year.

And they said that, "Oh, we've asked the industry, we've asked the energy providers, and it looks like there's 5.8 gigawatts of future demand in the pipeline, which would be the same as the amount of electricity that Ireland uses right now as I'm talking to you." So it would be huge. And again, it's like where did this figure come from? On what basis is it justified? These are questions that have not been worked out, and I think it all leads back to this idea of a moratorium. This is an industry that is advancing at a very quick scale, but for its benefit. And all signs when we see sovereignty seem to be pointing at more or less the same companies benefiting. And there's really brilliant research from SOMO that I'm sure you're aware of, which points to this. And I would encourage anyone listening to read it because it kind of tracks the companies who are building out and that kind of power mapping I suppose is very important when we discuss this, especially for policymakers.

I think it's always interesting to hear about these government initiatives that big tech are pushing for disseminating the use of AI and creating demand for data centers across the state, across public bodies and across industry. Because what it shows is that this is a top-down initiative to build out data centers. The estimate of seven trillion US dollars being spent in five years is not coming from people demanding extra data center capacity. In fact, there was a recent Bain and Company report that showed a revenue gap of $4 trillion annually in 2030. They're spending so much money on data centers, they're not even clear where the revenue to pay for that and get a return on that is coming from, which is what's leading to all of the discussion about it being a bubble. And that demonstrates something quite important, I think, which is that this is an initiative from big tech who've amassed huge money piles from their monopolistic practices arguably, and from investors who see this as a way of capturing rents into the future and dominating the future global economy.

But it's an investment cycle and there's very worrying signs that it is a bubble and there are very worrying signs that actually this isn't something which people, workplaces or enterprises are demanding at the scale of which it's being built out, which leaves the question, what are we going to end up with when a devaluation takes place and the rest of it? And policymakers I think would be incredibly wise to question what that means because it's not the case. The scale of the hype coming from these companies to benefit their own share offers and their own capital raising is what's driving the speed and pace and demand to push aside every single barrier and every single constraint on that build out. And people are saying, wait a sec, why are you rushing so much? Why are you shifting our planning laws so we no longer have as much voice in it?

Why are you accepted as acceptable that big tech is lobbying for the abandonment of climate targets when it's hype and it's obviously hype? And I think what's really worrying and what I see is communities that I speak to are having really nuanced, detailed debates about AI and data centers and the role of big tech in society. And yet our politicians are in a slightly different place. They're saying this is the only way forward. We have to do it. There is no choice. There is no alternative. And it feels very much like they've completely bought into the hype that's coming from these big tech companies. And what the days of action are about is those people having that discussion, reclaiming democratic right to say that we should have sovereignty over the decisions about data centers. Sovereignty is about people making decisions and democracy. And at the minute we've got politicians who are going headlong at speed to build evermore and bigger and saying every single barrier should be moved out of the way, whether that's climate constraints, whether that's concern about water, whether that's community constraints, and seeing community objections as a barrier or constraint on this build out which must take place.

Whereas actually that's democracy in action. And it's those communities who are taking action this weekend, whether it's having a march in Dublin or marching in Madrid and Barcelona, whether it's having public debates in their communities, whether it's writing poetry as they're doing in Slough, whether it's protesting about the cutting downs of trees in Finland. That's what sovereignty over AI is about. It's about people taking action together and exercising their democratic right to say, we should be the ones that decide on what conditions these data centers get built out, on what conditions they are, on what environmental harms we think are acceptable and how we should be mitigating those harms. And so if we're going to have a conversation about sovereignty, it's so important that we push it back down to those community discussions which I see happening because the gulf between where people are at and where our elected leaders are at at this moment is a very worrying place to be that there's such a gap.

And I think wise politicians would be waking up and going having those communities and leading those discussions to their communities and coming up with a policy based on where people are actually at, not where big tech lobbyists are telling them they need to go.

Campaigners and protestors have raised fundamental questions about the data center boom, about who gets access to information, who bears the environmental and social costs, and what Europe's ambitions for technological sovereignty actually mean in practice. These questions are also at the center of recent investigations into the industry. Last week, Tech Policy Press in partnership with Investigate Europe and other media partners published an investigation into labor abuses on data center construction sites. Separate reporting by Investigate Europe and Lighthouse Reports have looked into Big Tech's influence over EU transparency rules and the public's right to know about the environmental costs of data centers. Lighthouse Reports has taken this issue further with a legal challenge under the Aarhus Convention. I spoke to Mei-Ling McNamara from Investigate Europe and Daniel Howden from Lighthouse Reports about their work and what will it take to influence policymaking on data centers. Daniel and Mei-Ling, thanks so much for being here.

You've both at your organizations been investigating different aspects of your data center expansion. Mei-Ling, you, Investigate Europe recently in partnership with Tech Policy Press has published this investigation on conditions of workers building those facilities and how also previously big tech has influenced EU rules in terms of transparency. And then Lighthouse has done something very interesting as a journalistic organization and taking this issue further by filing a legal challenge on EU's approach under the Aarhus Convention. So let's start by briefly introducing your investigative work on this topic and what do you think it reveals about how the industry operates in Europe?

Yeah, I mean this really was an important investigation for us because so much of what we've been seeing is the way in which we're unable to penetrate inside data centers, what is being disclosed to us and what is actually happening. These sites and these projects are so secretive and they're usually secretive because of the client confidentiality. So typically behind these large projects that are run by really big companies, we have big tech companies. They're the ones who are the clients that move in. But what we hear so little about is the people actually building these projects during active construction. And so what was really important about this was to actually get inside and understand. I had a tip off that there might be something going on up in Sweden, but then what I found when I did this was that there was a number of issues all around Europe and it concerned a lot of the construction companies that were actually hiring these contractors and subcontractors.

So this was a major point and I was able to really get access to workers for the first time and able to actually get access into some of the real conditions that they're facing, both through their wages, but also through their living conditions and their day-to-day.

And Daniel, what prompted your investigation into the transparency aspect and also more necessarily take this issue further by filing a legal challenge?

Our starting point for this investigation were the same kinds of questions that people all over the world are increasingly asking about the AI rollout and about its most visible manifestation, which is data centers. They want to know how much water is going to get used. They want to know how much power is going to be used. They want to know what are the potential forms of pollution this creates. They want to know about climate emissions and those consequences. So if you start from those questions, it's been extremely hard to get simple answers to these. And our focus was to target an EU efforts to gather information. Essentially, the European Union has for the last three years been on a huge information gathering spree. They have probably the best answers to those questions anywhere in the world. They're being held centrally. The member states have been told to gather up key performance indicators on every data center in Europe.

So that is the water and power usage, that is excess heat, that is the kind of indicators that would help us to reconstruct climate emissions. All of this gets centrally gathered. It's been gathered in a place where freedom of information laws should guarantee us access to this. So we began asking for it to begin initially. We were told by member states that they haven't yet gathered the data. Then we were told that it was commercially confidential. And then finally we received the string of refusals from the European Commission and it became clear and answers to this question were really helped by the work that's been done at the Corporate Europe Observatory and some of the reporting's also have been done by Investigate Europe to highlight how big tech companies got to write their own provisions into European laws and strengthen the commercial secrecy around individual data center sites.

So what you can get publicly is aggregated to the point where it's completely useless for communities themselves and for people and for any kind of democratic participation. So it's kind of locked out of answers to the questions that we might have. Strategic litigation is a poorly understood tool. It takes an enormous amount of patience to wield it effectively. But the one aspect of it that doesn't necessarily require so much patience is that strategic litigation's fundamentally about changing public discourse. You set up legal challenges. Of course, you hope in the end to win your legal challenge, but the fact of the legal challenge in and of itself can generate headlines and it can help the public to see where their politicians stand and what influence over them big tech companies have. And that can be really clarifying and that's why we took the decision. We don't relish the idea as journalists of writing 16,000-word legal submissions, but sometimes that's necessary if you want to move at the pace which can actually help this.

While we are trying to break through what we call a wall of silence and data centers, the facts on the ground are changing every day and reporting that illustrates the human cost of that in terms of data center construction workers is profound. The signs from the little windows that we can look through to see the bigger picture, the climate emissions situation is profound. So making the stakes clear for the public. And there's one last thing I would say about it. People have really responded to the idea that investigative journalists spent a year pushing with every lawful means to get answers to this. And it's really helped people to understand that there is a conspiracy of silence and that their own kind of gut feeling in response to these companies actually accords with reality. And sometimes the answers you can't get are almost more illustrative than the technical information that you might have otherwise been able to obtain.

And it really says something that you spend a year and also Investigate Europe has been looking into this issue that it's so hard to get access to critical information by journalists. So imagine for public, and I was speaking to campaigners of the EUI protest this weekend earlier before speaking to you and they were talking about the same fundamental question is that how do you support development of projects when you don't really understand who they're for, what they're for, and at the same time your electricity bills are going up, up, up because you just... So there's this communication gap and public gap that we're seeing, but it's just so hard to also understand at the same time that from the commission and at a political level, they have bought into this idea of going all out on AI adoption and building for AI adoption without actually understanding what is at stake here.

So yeah, one of the things that I wanted to come into as well is commercial confidentiality is often the excuse. The commission users and generally also globally do hide data about environmental impact, but also other impacts. So how do we go past this problem and what is the fundamental legal but also democratic problem when this is the argument they use?

Well, maybe Daniel can go first around the work that they're doing and then I can speak a little bit about some of the access issues that we've had in terms of making the public... Aware of what is going on behind some of these data centers with workers. And I'm talking it all high up the chain. So Daniel, if you'd like to go first and I can go in.

One of the first things that comes out is that people feel powerless in the face of what is described as an inevitable AI build out. But we do actually have laws and those laws do offer protections when it comes to our right to know. One of those legal frameworks is an international convention, the Aarhus Convention. And what that enshrines is our right to know, especially when it comes to emissions related information. And Aarhus is really specific in so much as it says that this right supersedes commercial confidentiality in all but the most limited of circumstances. Now, this is an international treaty. All EU governments are signed up to it. It is legally binding, but it isn't a substitute for the commission changing its own stance and deciding that transparency is the way to go. We really are in a very interesting political moment. We're having this conversation in the immediate wake of the US midterms where there was essentially a wipe out for the industry itself.

A large amount of money was sunk into contests all over the country in search of positive outcomes for light regulation or deregulation or avoidance of any regulation tool over tech. There were data center provisions on many of the ballots and they all got swept away inside of public opposition. And trust has been right at the heart of that. I know from conversations that I've had that people in senior roles, big tech companies know that they've got this wrong. Their secretive approach born out of a culture in Silicon Valley of NDAs, which are used for right, left and center for almost everything, has just bred this culture in which you change the facts on the grounds, you give away as little as possible, secrets from your competition, secrets from the public authorities. The public is disregarded. In our reporting that she found senior people in the data center industry referring to the public as CAVE people for their opposition to data centers.

They're all having a good laugh sitting up on stage and caves refers in this instance as citizens against virtually everything and then everyone fools about laughing. So there's a contempt of the public, a culture of secrecy. And this means in practice that people feel that they're being lied to and manipulated that even in instances where data centers could be a good option for a community, maybe they have a water surplus, maybe they have sources of power which aren't going to mean that the centers compete for resources with housing and ordinary people. Even those instances, they're now getting blocked. As much good work has been done and out of the work lighthouse has done and I think Investigate Europe and many others have done really useful reporting here. Public has been well ahead of both politics and journalism. There has been a kind of folk wisdom in people's attitudes towards big tech and data centers.

And now it's up to politicians, it's up to civil society, to journalists to inform that resistance. Public has been well ahead on this.

Yeah, I think I might add as well, I don't think we can underestimate the amount of money that is now being poured into Europe and European data centers. We're seeing a migration from a lot of investment in the United States due to a lot of the pushback migrate now into Europe. And particularly what we've seen is the Nordics. Data centers come in and they'll come in for all sorts of reasons. They'll look for a way to have a wedge into a community and they'll move in and they will use what they can to get the contract. I think we also can underestimate the amount of money, but also the legal threat that communities and the public and journalists face if they do try and cover these stories. And this is something that we came up against when we did this story as well. There's a lot of money involved not only with the big tech companies, but with the companies that are also profiting hugely from building these data centers.

There is a lot of fear for those who are on the subcontracting chains that they will not get these jobs if they speak out. So there's a complicity of silence, there's a culture of silence, and there's fear that they won't get the next jobs as these subcontracting chains move around Europe in groups, hiring the same people and hiring the same companies. If you stick your head above the parapets, it'll be cut down. You won't get another contract. And this is what we've seen. So there is also of course the legal secrecy, the NDAs that are at every aspect of the project. But then there's also something I think less visible, and that is that sense of hiring precarious workers who don't have a lot of power, who don't have a long-term contract, who come from a poor EU country or even not from an EU country and cannot speak up.

So I agree absolutely that ultimately the fact that people did speak up and showed tremendous courage and bravery and took incredible risks is the power of the public to hold ultimately these companies accountable. And you can see that in the States, of course it was on the ballot and you can see how they can't necessarily triumph, right? But I do think that information is power and to stymie that information getting out to the public is absolutely the point because the public does wield the most power here. And so I think it is on the shoulders of journalists, on the shoulders of politicians, on the shoulders of anyone who can actually join up the dots around Europe and beyond to present this to the public in a way that they feel that they can take some form of actionable defense. I think we've seen in Ireland efforts to stymie some of these objections through legal means.

And I think that we're going to see that more throughout Europe as well. We know the bottleneck happens during the planning permission process and we know it happens through any form of legal objection. And once that gets to the bottleneck, it's pretty much a clear path for data centers. And sometimes countries, communities will have buyer's remorse, but it's really difficult once it's being built, once it's in the active phase to go back. So I think that is where they're hoping they can keep the silence until they actually break ground. We can see what happened in Finland recently. It's now been suspended, this project that cut 250,000 acres in Finland without an environmental planning going through. But how many other data centers are doing this right now? So I think we need to ask those questions.

Certainly Netherlands is also precedent of data center development being stopped in response to protests and opposition. But I think both of you are talking about the accountability to the supply chain and policymaking process I think is very important and there are gaps there. And I often ask this question, of course there's a lot of public outrage right now. There's a lot of public resistance. Certainly this weekend is one of the biggest, I think, moments of momentum against data centers. But realistically and in concrete terms, from the policy perspective as well, can communities be involved in that policymaking process? And throughout the supply chain decision making, is there anything legally that requires their involvement? And I would also point out this irony because we're in the European Innovation Month, what the commission is celebrating right now, and there's an Apply AI Summit, which is a year after the Apply AI Strategy was introduced happening this month.

A lot of people in civil society organizations and researchers and communities have said the same thing, that they're not being involved in those discussions. They've also had trouble registering for these events. It's sort of the same story that happened with the Dublin Summit under the Irish presidency. So how do we involve the communities in these decisions outside protests?

I'm happy to jump in there. If you want to make a journalist feel really awkward, you just ask them what are you supposed to do with their work and with their findings? It's like, okay, but what do I do about this? How do I respond to it? And I think this is where nonprofit mission-driven newsrooms really have a responsibility to provide some parts of the answer there and to work more broadly and in a more collaborative way with civil society organizations and others who can actually make suggestions and interventions, like give paths to action. The traditional journalist model was I stay completely outside of processes of change. I deliver my findings and the world needs to change in response to them if it wants to, but that's nothing to do with me. Nonprofit journalism needs to begin with the understanding that investigations, findings are upstream of policy and culture, and you've got to be willing to walk downstream part of the way towards people who are actually working on change and people who are making culture.

I'll give a few examples to make a point. A 16,000 word Aarhus submission seems like an unlikely publication to drive wild popular response, but the fact of that legal challenge drove headlines. The fact that those headlines then gave us a chance to work with popular creators who have really substantial audiences running from half a million upwards in different countries. And those creators knew how to translate those findings into a public conversation, which would both be funny, entertaining, informative, and the volume of response and questions that those posts got meant that they're now completely switched on to the idea that data centers are a hot cultural topic. So that's a form of public awareness. What you're doing there is building a constituency that can help to change the political calculus for the actual decision makers. If we go back a year or go back two years, let's say that you are a regulator, you are somewhere in European political decision making framework, your political calculus is pretty clear and you have the largest lobby in the EU by some distance.

It's spending freely. It can offer jobs in the future. It can offer potential theoretical rewards in a way that you can sell to constituents right now. Your political calculus leans totally towards buying into the future. You're being told by well-paid and intelligent people that opposing data centers means opposing the future, which isn't a great look. What we're doing at the moment, yes, we can talk about very specific policy prescriptions, but we're working on changing the political calculus here. You are sitting at some point in the decision making hierarchy. That calculus also needs to change for you and you need to see how it's going to be to your benefit, to your constituent's benefit's going to make a difference or you are visible and will be scrutinized for the decisions that you make. So the hard end of that is investigative journalism that highlights the influence on specific decision makers.

And at the cultural end of it, there's a growing constituency which is activated around the idea of asking questions and being skeptical about visions of the future that they're being sold.

Yeah. And if I may just jump in one last bit is that as part of this story we did, we highlighted the existing unions that were available to some of these workers. I don't think you have to reinvent the wheel or create new things that are already in the public, but what you can do is help to strengthen what does exist and to have this form of information sharing and to show that because some of these things are companies coming in without collective agreements, deciding not to do collective agreements, whether they're led by the big tech companies or they're led by the contractors. And a lot of the workers, for example, weren't aware of this. Or if the unions were there, they weren't speaking in the language that a lot of these workers use. So I think it's sort of making it aware of what sort of public entities exist for workers or those involved to be able to get these sorts of protections.

But I also think, of course, with Investigate Europe, we do things at the EU level as well. And part of that is really to talk to some of our policymakers looking at, for example, the Quality Jobs Act that they're considering now for December and how to then strengthen the rights of workers and the general oversight of some of these sites. So there aren't secrecy clauses in a way that unions can actually get access. And in the course of our investigation, just in the last week, there's this incredible momentum that you're seeing that in the public that they know this is going to go public. So maybe collective agreements that were stalled at the moment actually got pushed through as part of reporting or making more visible. But also too, you're starting to see a much bigger momentum of how people can start to enshrine more laws to protect workers in these kind of really extraordinary circumstances.

When you have a buildup that's accelerating so much quicker than normal, you're having sites that are so much more dangerous than normal, but you're not getting access. So even just since publication, unions that weren't able to get access to some of these sites, whether it's the Netherlands or it's Finland or it's Sweden, have been able to actually get access now in ways that I don't think they were before. And I think that this is really important the way that civil society can also work together and really just highlight what's out there already. So I think there's good ways that you can work. And I do agree with Daniel. I also think there still is and can be a firewall between journalism and civil society. And at the same time, there could be an exchange of real value here where they don't have to be so separate from each other.

Absolutely. It's the season for collaborations, and we're all here for it.

The United States midterm election season proved that tech policy is no longer a side issue in American elections. AI, data centers and the political power of Big Tech and oligarchs like Elon Musk are now things candidates have to take a position on — and voters are paying close attention.

After the polls closed on Tuesday, Democrats posted sweeping wins up and down the ballot. If their victory speeches are any indication, efforts to hold Big Tech accountable and to address data centers and AI governance will continue to be defining issues in Washington and in state capitols across the country. 

To unpack what the election results could mean for the future of US tech policy, we pulled together a live podcast discussion with guests including 

, CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology; 

I am pleased to be joined today for this conversation on assessing the impact of the midterm elections on US tech policy. I've got an excellent set of panelists that are joining us. I've got Brian Chen, who's policy director at Data and Society, Alexandra Reeve Givens, who is the CEO at Center for Democracy and Technology, and Robert Weissman, who is co-president at Public Citizen. These folks have a lot of experience obviously working on tech policy issues, working on Capitol Hill, and thinking about various issues that sort of intersect with tech policy, including corporate power, including the way that Congress works. So I'm hoping that we can have a good discussion today and maybe push a little bit past the headlines that we've read just to date in the last 48 hours or so, see where these folks are thinking and maybe get a good sense of where we ought to be focusing our attention over the next few weeks.

So I'm going to just start things off, hopefully giving everybody a chance to give a general takeaway, something that they are thinking about that's sort of top of mind for them. And I suppose the way I might want to start is by asking what you think will endure about the results on Tuesday. I mean, clearly there's been a lot of headlines. We've seen a lot of sweeping coverage of a degree and the scale of the Democrats' victory across the country, both in Congress but also across the states. But I'm wondering what you think will endure, what we'll still be talking about a year from now about the effect of Tuesday's elections. And Rob, I think I might start with you on that. I mean, your organization's talked a lot about what this election says about corporate power, corporate spending, corporate influence on our politics. What will endure a year from now?

Yeah, I think that some of the big themes are going to be generic, but also very specific to the tech sector and you were beginning to touch on them. So we saw this is the most expensive election in American history and we saw by far the most direct corporate spending in American history. We saw huge investments by AI and big tech companies overwhelmingly on the Republican side. We saw Elon Musk put on, we don't know yet how much, might've been up to half a billion dollars in this election, and that was a big fail. And we also saw in races around the country pretty intense resentment toward big tech, toward AI, and especially on data centers. So I think as we move forward, there's going to be in Congress, and we'll see about the administration, but in Congress, a shift towards greater demand for corporate accountability and a new willingness to go after big tech.

We've really seen things stall in Congress even after an initial moment of ChatGPT 3.0 where it's like maybe there'll be regulation that lasted about six months and it's gone. Now we may have another window where that's going to happen, but it's going to be very contested. So without going on too long and filibustering, maybe that's a big topic. I think there's an opening, but where it's going to go is very much up for grabs.

Alex, how about you? What will endure a year from now?

Yeah, I mean I think people are talking about this as the affordability election, that the thing that really was driving people is just how difficult it is to get by in the course of their daily lives. But when you pull back the broader theme around that I think is people feeling deeply disempowered and both the economy and the government aren't working for them. And so that I think is going to be a theme that endures in terms of the priorities that Congress has to pursue, the language and framing that both members of Congress and state legislators and advocates will be using to help show the salience of these issues to people's regular lives. And that ends up meaning a lot for the advocacy agenda. And also just this question of how society navigates when we continue to hear about the massive transformation that is going to be shaping our country and our world and lawmakers sit idly by without engaging on it or providing meaningful guardrails, the American people want action.

And so both, I think this grounding of affordability, wealth questions, lack of trust in institutions and lack of trust in the companies coupled with a real desire to see governments hearing those concerns and taking concrete actions to address them.

Yeah, I mean in terms of what endures, probably the just sort of election as pushback against Trump in general is the most obviously the thing and the force, the political force that's going to endure the most. That is going to be the most resilient, that is going to have the most profound implications for our politics, for the GOP party, for the Democrats. I think as far as tech, I might actually say there's certainly the popular opinion is very clear. People are very anti-AI, they're very anti-data center. It is a little bit more tricky I think to say that endures indefinitely because it's going to go through some... There are going to be really interesting effects as we start to see that go from this protest vote against AI and data centers and translating that into an actual governing agenda for what politicians want to do about that.

Clearly there has been a mandate, people don't like these data centers in their backyard. They don't even like them in their neighbor's backyard even if they live quite far away. They don't like the effects of AI in education in all kinds of parts of society. But in terms of how are you actually going to govern and deliver on that for politicians, one thing that I've been paying attention to is just thinking about every single politician has... It's not even partisan at this point. Every politician says we are against AI, we want to do some restrictions on data centers. But now that there's an actual governing moment, we're going to have progressives and centrists and conservatives come out with a variety of policies and they're going to say, "We are sticking it to big tech. We are doing some kind of restrictions on data centers. We're doing restrictions on the use of AI." And it is an open question to me.

I think which of any of those is going to matter the most to voters? Do they want the bread and butter stuff like affordability, making sure their utility bills don't go up? Do they want broader anti-oligarchic measures for the economy writ large? That's the stuff that I think is more sort of amorphous.

You've been writing about this, Brian, in particular, you get a piece in Dissent that focused on the politics of data centers. Are there particular races that you're looking at around the country that indicate to you which way we might go on those questions?

Well, one state that I was looking at quite a lot, and I want to shout out the work of my colleagues at Data and Society, they put out this report on Pennsylvania, The AI Factory that was really just this great deep dive on the AI build outs in that state. Pennsylvania was interesting because there, the governor's race, Josh Shapiro won big. There was no drama about whether or not Josh Shapiro was going to win, but he really wasn't trying to win Pennsylvania. He was trying to position himself as a national leader for 2028. And so what Shapiro did with respect to AI and data centers is, I think, quite illuminating. How he moved during the election is, it tells us something about how politicians want to triangulate their position as a reaction to this opposition, this popular opposition to big tech. And so we saw, and as my colleagues documented, early in the cycle, Shapiro was a huge data center booster.

He really wasn't that far away from the messaging you might hear from President Trump or a representative of the tech industry. He talked up about the generational opportunities of this private investment in the AI data center construction. He wanted to fast track projects to invite development in Pennsylvania, and he had lines where it was like, "This is really important for national security, and this is important that we lead in innovation and that we beat China in innovation, and we're going to create all these great construction jobs." And as people in Pennsylvania became further organized and mobilized and voiced their opposition, you saw a pivot by the governor and the governor's office to say, "Okay, data centers are important, but we recognize what people are saying. We need to do some slowdowns. We need companies to bring their own energy. We want there to be more community engagement." And then much, much later in the campaign, as the data center sentiment just really, really worsened over the summer, Shapiro released an executive order that really doubled down on what his office called the strictest sort of restrictions on data centers, focusing on energy affordability, on environmental protection.

I think the question is, did the governor actually change his policy position or did he just change the political messaging? There have been a number of organizing groups in Pennsylvania who said that even though Shapiro calls these the strictest limitations on data centers, there's sort of glorified restatements of what the law actually says already about the permitting process in the state. And so politicians, I think, recognize the populist politics. They understand that it is a winning message to be against data centers, and yet there still is a brand of politician, powerful politician that is synthesizing that with this political strategy of you need to hold together this coalition of voters and organized labor and capital. And so how much of that anti-data center resentment really, does it turn into just milquetoast protections or is there something more transformative, more powerful that politicians can offer as an alternative?

Rob, Alex, I don't know if you want to jump in on this and if there are maybe other exemplar races you'd want to point at.

It's amazing how data centers were an issue really across the country. If you happen to be traveling and you popped into a state and turn on the TV, there it is, there's an ad on data centers. But I think too where it was central were Ohio and Texas. Ohio, Sherrod Brown, he made data centers and labeling his opponent as data center Husted as central to the campaign and was able to turn all the support that his opponent had been getting from the crypto industry and from AI against him pretty effectively. And in Texas, it was also a central issue. And there, I think it's very interesting what happened in the governor's race as well as the Senate race. In the governor's race, that's the discussion we just had about Shapiro in Pennsylvania. In Texas, Greg Abbott, obviously to the right of Josh Shapiro, pivoted so totally that he imposed a statewide moratorium on new data centers.

No new permits were going to be granted for any data center construction. It happens we have an office in Texas and we found that while the permitting agency was still granting permits because they actually literally have them as a rubber stamp. They're automatic. You apply and they're automatically given, no one even looks at it. So we called it out and then the governor intervened and they shut down the permitting. So if you saw that happening even in Texas, I agree with Brian completely on the overarching point that there's going to be a big fight about how much this sticks and particularly among the Democrats and to some extent the Republicans, how much they're accepting the populist moment or how much they're still bowing down to the donor class. That said, I think the data center issue, which is an issue in its own right and also connected and sort of a signifier for the broader question about big tech oligarchic power, it is real.

And if it was real enough to shift the position of Greg Abbott, no politician is immune.

Yeah, and Rob landed right where I was going to go, which is just one of the things that is remarkable to me is in every single election, whether it was for Congress at state level as well, we see people leaning into tech policy issues and it wasn't just data centers and it's making it into the victory speeches, it's making it into the committee chairmanship memoranda that are circulating this week as people make their bids for chairs of different committees. And so you really are seeing a focus there. And time and again in each of those instances, again, whether it's data centers or it is about privacy AI governance, it is about this question of whether or not companies and the government are responsive to Americans' daily lives and the issues that are impacting them. And so that moment of tech issues really hitting kitchen table issues, which many of us who have worked in this field and Justin, you curate the newspaper for our field or the blog for our field, we've known this for a long time, but seeing it pierce through to this level of dialogue I think is a really important shift.

Yeah, maybe just stick with that just for a second because it feels to me like that's the thing that's really changed is that tech policy is now the everyday kitchen table issue on some level. The tech politics has gotten very, very interesting. I feel like we're seeing people connect issues now in their head. They're seeing AI in schools, social media and their children's lives. They're connecting that to concerns over surveillance, concerns over data centers, concerns over jobs and artificial intelligence. It seems to me that, at least as far as the rhetoric's concerned, we did see Democrats seem to make that connection relatively successfully, but it strikes me it's a much harder thing to address. I don't know, what do you think needs to happen to address that, Alex, in the next few months to satiate that desire to address those politics?

I mean, I think we're going to be looking at a couple different tools in the toolkit for members of Congress, and one of them is going to be an active oversight and investigations agenda, and we've seen that even in the course of the past 48 hours in social media rallying cries around subpoenas. Then of course there's going to be pushing the legislative agenda, which to be clear, even if bills aren't crossing the finish line, we're in the race for 2028 now. And so members are going to be showing what they stand for, what the solution space looks like and showcasing their priorities through the legislative pushes that they make. In terms of the oversight agenda, this can go in two different directions. So one, and I imagine Rob will talk more about this, will be looking at some of the company practices that are impacting Americans, particularly as pocketbook issues, kitchen table issues, and doing oversight where the government so far they believe has been falling short.

But the other that I really think and hope we spend time with is oversight of the unbelievable attack on constitutional rights and values that we've seen over the past two years and the real concerns about corruption and grift and the targeting of people across the country. And one of the challenges, I think it's both an opportunity and a challenge. The challenge will be spending enough time on those issues to do them justice, to create the marker point in history of these being unforgivable oversteps that we should not repeat, and also delivering on that agenda of showing the American people that you are addressing kitchen table issues and affordability. But where those two come together is these concerns around corruption and abuse of power. I think if the Democrats, what I anticipate watching them do is tie those two things together and thread the needle and be able to have both the democratic reckoning that we need to help ensure a healthy democracy and robust safeguards moving forward and happy to talk about what some of those issues are and also really speaking to this moment of tech governance that's needed as well.

And just to jump on Alex's point, I mean, we all remember that photo during Trump's second inauguration where all the tech leaders and CEOs are kind of front row at the inauguration, and we take for granted that that's really weird. Why was that the case? Why did that happen? It really underscores Alex's point that there is a level of corruption and self-dealing and coziness with the tech industry that I think would be smart politics to go after in terms of using oversight, doing investigations with your new House majority or Senate majority. There's really no other place to start. I mean, there's many places to start, but one of the ones that absolutely has to be on that list has to be DOGE. I mean, that is such a clear example of abuse where the White House was partnering with a tech trillionaire, Elon Musk, maybe today he's a billionaire at this point, inviting all these sort of quasi-contractors in from Silicon Valley to go through agencies to figure out where is the fraud or abuse, so to speak, and really just laying off people who have been career civil servants.

That chapter really needs to be resurfaced and Democrats need to be taking a look at that and say, "What actually was happening there? What was the role of the tech companies there? What was the back channeling between these tech leaders and senior officials in the Trump administration to facilitate this sort of DOGE process?" Because it really speaks so much to this fusion, this corrupt fusion between the state and industry.

When I checked yesterday, he was down 850 billion. So today maybe it's back up, I don't know. The limit is going to be the number of days in the year in terms of the oversight agenda. The policy agenda is a little bit, I think, more knotty and complicated where it's going to go, but I think we should anticipate seeing oversight related to tech policy across committee sectors. And maybe we've just highlighted three areas, which I think is right. One is going to be just the naked corruption and the big tech embrace of the Trump administration, and all that means all the ways that money has been funneled to Trump and his related things through the ballroom inaugural committee, these corrupt settlements of fake lawsuits by Trump, et cetera, and then what they're getting back in exchange. Two is going to be, I think, the governmental policy towards tech, towards Musk specifically, and number one, but really widely.

There's a lot obviously to be looked at and the sort of aggressive combination of laissez-faire and also simultaneously state industrial policy and critical minerals and more just to kind of a morass of secrecy and corruption. And then last, because there hasn't been any federal regulation at all, which in fairness is not only a problem of the Trump administration, but is a specific problem of the Trump administration, because Alex was saying they're the practices of the companies themselves, including I think some of the frontier AI issues and the hacking questions, hacking is sort of the understatement of the problem, and also I think a lot on focus on companion chatbots and impact on kids. I guess I skipped over, I just don't want to ignore the point that Alex made in the governmental policy space, the issue of surveillance and abuse of civil liberties and the facilitation of the cruelty and brutality of ICE by various tech companies I think is also going to appropriately and necessarily come under close scrutiny.

Well, let's spend just a minute maybe laying out for our viewers and listeners what we can expect in different committees or what you anticipate, at least on what you're seeing right now. I mean, we know that the Democrats apparently are, it's been reported planning a kind of multi-pronged effort to look into Musk in particular, and it seems like that's both necessary given the scale of some of the things that you've described and that Brian described in particular, but also somewhat likely popular in a way that addressing Musk as a kind of singular exemplar of a lot of the corruption and the problems that we're seeing around tech and capitalism in this country makes a lot of sense. He's also very close to a lot of the concerns over AI and national security and influence abroad, all of those things. But what else can we expect?

What committees do we expect to be particularly active, both investigative and oversight? I assume, Alex, if I remember correctly, you were on a Judiciary as a staffer. I assume we'll see a very busy judiciary committee. What other committees across both the House and the Senate can we anticipate being very active?

I mean, I expect it's going to be a mix and that's probably a good thing to be able to staff this appropriately and spend time. I'd love to talk about four areas that I think are going to be really important for oversight, and I'm going to focus on oversight of the Trump administration and then know that we can turn later to more commercial practices, some of the other things that Rob was listing in his taxonomy. The DOGE one is really important, and obviously there's the Musk angle that I think helps frame this in the people's mind in terms of there being an avatar to represent what that looked like, but really drilling down on what was an extraordinary illegal grabbing and consolidation of Americans' personal data by the government, trying to make sure that that doesn't get lost in a wonky discussion, and instead people realize the real assault on constitutional principles and values and the American people's trust that embodies, right?

So we have DOGE being able to access and consolidate people's highly sensitive data from the IRS, from social security, using it for immigration enforcement, federal agencies demanding that states hand over deeply personal data about SNAP and Medicaid recipients. They're breaking laws, they're being sued for this, their injunctions being issued. When people do get their hands on the data, you have random DOGE staffers getting read-write access over the treasury's payment system, evidence of them using personal laptops. So just this very flagrant disregard for the importance of these things, and the fact that these are tied to social safety net programs and programs that people when their beneficiaries really do hold dear, I think is an important element to unpack, not least because it needs to lead to legislative reforms, but the oversight piece of this is essential. So that's one. Two is going back to this surveillance question.

So how do we create this national reckoning on the assault on Americans' personal privacy and the right to protest? So we've had examples of ICE treating dissent as criminal conduct, following protestors home and sharing personal facts about them to intimidate them from protesting, using face recognition in the field, threatening protestors with arrest for filming ICE agents, monitoring and mining dissenter social media feeds to be able to identify them, and then of course all the ideological-based screening being used in immigration decisions writ large, so reporters being banned access to the country if they've covered a protest before. So that is a really important vein, and we've seen members of Congress talk already just this week around what the oversight agenda and what appropriate controls will look like there. Two more that I'd highlight. The next is this assault on the First Amendment that we've seen, including the ideological takeover of the FCC and the FTC.

Two agencies, which to be clear, should be defending American consumers and should have that as their day job every single day at a time when our country is undergoing enormous technological change. Instead, what we've seen is these absurd unconstitutional efforts to get people kicked off the air because you don't like their coverage or revoke a broadcast license because you think that a program is too woke or conditioning a merger approval on somebody dropping their advertising, changing their advertising policies in the Omnicom case, hearings on gender-affirming care and it being a deceptive trade practice. I mean, time and time again of these chairmen of these now deeply political agencies because the Democratic commissioners were fired, very clearly pursuing a political agenda, in my opinion, deeply at the expense of the things that they should actually be focusing on to serve the American people. And so making sure that those abuses are highlighted, and again, tying it to this question of what self-serving ideological work looks like versus addressing Americans' everyday needs.

And then the fourth one that I'll touch on, CDT has an elections and democracy team. We are deeply focused on the efficient and fair functioning of elections. Luckily, this election did not see major crises or discrediting, but we have to be really clear. It was not for lack of trying by the administration to significantly shake the foundations of our electoral democracy. Lawsuits against the states demanding that they hand over detailed voter information, the administration trying to wreck mail-in voting, impacting a third of voters across the country who vote by mail, attempts to sequester mail ballots, ballots, threats of prosecuting election officials, and that's just been the past couple weeks. There, again, we have to have the reckoning, number one, for accountability and to make sure that we are placing that marker in history, but two, to shore up our defenses for the work and time ahead.

So there are many other topics that we can cover, but those four alone are really big and really important. They could each fit into different committees, so we'll let the majority leader figure that one out. But I do think that each of those is going to be really important to help make sure that we're making progress and holding the administration to account for the abuses that we've seen in those spaces.

What I appreciate about Alex's length of all those oversight examples is each of those is really constructive. There's versions of oversight where people are twiddling their thumbs and doing a lot but not actually accomplishing anything, and it's just sort of like, "Well, Trump's a bad guy. Elon Musk is a bad guy." All of this stuff that Alex pointed out, it's sort of like this is how your rights have been affected. This is how your information and data has been impacted. This is how your benefits have been made more inaccessible. All of this is sort of really helpful as constructive politics if we think about oversight along this two-year window that we're trying to build a narrative, build a longer term vision that hopefully can transform into something in the 2028 election. So I just wanted to add that little piece to it.

Yeah, I would say from an advocacy point of view, we think that the point that both Alex and Brian are making is super important that the oversight... There's tons of opportunities for gotcha moments, and that's good for individual social media accounts and stuff, and totally useless for shifting the political landscape. So we're really encouraging that the oversight be very intentional about setting up the policy reforms that are the remedy to the abuses that are being focused. On the broader question you're asking, Justin, I would say that I'm not sure what you're going to do with the name of your publication. I think it's going to be hard for tech policy to be thought of as a discrete thing if it still is, because these are the largest companies in the history of the world with this technology, which if it's a hundredth as grand as they claim it is, is going to be transformative and economy-wide.

So I think we're going to see things that are called tech policy or things that aren't called tech policy where tech is sort of the dominant piece of what we're talking about across committees. So in the tax committees, for example, they're going to have to deal with corporate tax. They're going to have to deal with whether they're special taxes on AI companies or the corporate tax issue directly, and specifically the problem of the big tech companies evading the base level of taxation, which they're masters of doing. We're going to talk about antitrust policy and anti-monopoly policy, and that covers all sectors of the economy, but it number one, focuses on the largest companies in the world, and those are all the tech companies. In the national security space, you're going to have, on the one hand, I think it'd be a lot of focus on what Musk has done in Ukraine and what it means to have a person, not even about a company, but a person in charge of this critical global infrastructure.

But also we're going to see huge questions also involving Musk by many others about AI enabled weaponry. And they've even created a commission on the so-called Future of War, which is basically an effort to expedite the advancement of AI enabled weaponry. So it's going to be present there. And the education and labor workforces, we're going to see a big focus on trying to get ahead of what is AI going to mean for the job landscape. And if it's nearly as disruptive as the companies themselves claim, what are the remedial measures to soften the blows and ensure transition and so on? In education, we're going to see it. In healthcare, we're going to see it. It's really going to be pervasive, I think, in the oversight agenda. Whether or not people think I'm going after the big tech companies, whatever they're going to be focusing on, given the role of these companies and the technology in our society now, it's going to eventually come back and include them.

What prospects do you all see for any specific legislative gains in the next couple of years? I mean, it strikes me that so many of the basics are still unaddressed, privacy probably being one of the biggest ones. Is there any prospect you think for some of these things to maybe cross divided Congress, maybe even cross the president's desk in the next two years?

I view it as part of my job description to be the person that always says this is the time for privacy. And I do it with full knowledge about just how difficult it is and yet we need to fight. I do think there are a couple of things that change the landscape, and this is true both on privacy and AI governance. On the privacy piece of it, this remains a bipartisan issue. Voters across the country care about this question. AI is revealing every single day how great the need is for greater regulation and greater controls for the enormous amount of information that we share about ourselves in the course of our daily lives using these chatbots, connecting these agents, and the way the information about you can be synthesized and used by anyone who has the power to do so. And so the threat I think has never been greater.

And the more people spend time with AI agents and find them fun and find them usable, I think they also are going to be realizing, wow, just how vulnerable they are. You can actually say the same thing for health tech. You can say the same thing for connected cars. Day in, day out, we're getting lessons about just how much data is collected and gathered about us at any given time. And we're seeing this bear out in real time. So for the past six months, CDT's had a partnership with this nonprofit named CivAI that has this really important demo that shows what data brokers can gather and share about you at any given time. So it's a live demo. You can literally type in your own name. You can see in real time the portfolio and the dossier that could be compiled on you on commercially available data.

You also can see that an AI agent in the click of a button can compile a list of gun owners in a particular town, people that attended a particular church, people that attended a particular health clinic. We've taken that on the road to show it to lawmakers and every single person is horrified and very rightly so. And we know what the solution space looks like for that. There are very simple bills that one can pass to limit the sale and sharing of that data and put greater controls on it. And we're seeing that starting to be modeled in the states. So that's one where again, hope springs eternal, and I don't want to just be the CDT Pollyanna pushing on this, but it really does feel like there may be changing conditions on the ground for that piece of the puzzle. And so that's going to be a top priority for us.

The other piece of course is what the AI governance space is going to look like. I don't think these safety issues are going to go away. This summer showed just whether lawmakers want to or not. These crises are going to land on their desk every day with new cyber intrusions, new cyber threats, people really worrying in a very material way around what the security landscape looks like. I think the big question for a lot of us, and these are folks in the Tech Policy Press community too, is what does that package look like? What does durable effective governance actually look like? We're still figuring out what that solution space looks like and how to legislate it. And then how do we make sure that we're not just dealing with one slice of the ways in which AI impacts people's lives, but creating the very necessary space that again, I think voters are expecting and our groups and communities have been demanding of thinking about all of these places where we need better guardrails, better accountability to make sure that people's rights and interests are protected.

Yeah, I think there's a narrow path for some modest legislative proposals to gain traction. I mean, like Alex, I expect there to be a lot of focus on some of the frontier AI safety issues, and I would expect there to be a real dedicated push on some of those bills, some of the things that include stuff like independent AI evaluators, third party evaluators, Representative Lori Trahan's [D-Mass.] bill, the Frontier Act really is probably the one bill that's in pole position on that issue. Unfortunately, it does have issues. It has problematic language about preempting state regulation. I would imagine that there's a legislative push at the federal level on data center regulation, things like protecting utility spikes in utility rates, making sure that companies pay their own way. I mean, these things are still pretty sort of like, this stuff is still really hard. Even though that there are majorities now in the House and Senate, it is still really hard to pass a law in the US.

In the Senate, getting a majority is remarkably difficult. You have Trump who's just sort of hovering above it all saying, "If you send me something that's crazy, I'm going to veto it." And then even in the House where Dems have quite a healthy majority, in some ways that majority works against them if you care about certain very progressive proposals going forward because the majority is such that the center is going to hold. If you have a holdout on the left or on the right, they're going to have much less sway over what the body does overall. And so a situation where you have one or two senators like a Senator Manchin who single-handedly took down Build Back Better back in the day, I don't think we're going to have something like that. And anything that does move forward is going to have to be very, very carefully negotiated both within Congress as well as with the White House.

Yeah, I guess building on that, I think there's also another dimension. So we're doing a lot of work in the states and on a variety of issues and political deepfakes, intimate deepfakes, companion chatbots, a bunch of issues. And in the states, we're seeing pretty good bipartisan support for measures. And I think that suggests, that doesn't necessarily translate federally, it hasn't, but we may be in a slightly different moment that way. That does not mean that things are going to sweep through. It just means there may be an opening and there has to be an opening to get it through the Senate unless there's some change of the filibuster, which is reasonably unlikely in the near term. So there is a bit of an opening there. That said, I think on the Democratic side, it's not just progressives versus moderates, and it may not even for this be primarily progressive versus moderates, so that's definitely a factor.

There's a decision that's going to have to be made by leadership about their willingness to offend donors, and we will see. We'll see what they're willing to do. There've been a surprising number of quotes in the media from members of Congress and even in some meetings that we've been in where members of their staff say overtly, "Yeah, but we don't want to offend the donors." And so that's still real. And although the tech side went heavily Republican, most of them actually aren't Republican or are happy to shift back. We've already seen OpenAI preemptively announce a significant pivot on how they're going to deal federally, which is to be softer and kinder in short. So we'll see. So I think in terms of specific issues, I think the AI safety frontier AI issues are definitely open because it's so pressing and it's the obviously federal issue.

I agree with Alex, it's actually complicated. It's not one where we got ready off the shelf good solutions. So that even if there's sort of political will, the policy piece is extra complicated in that space. It's possible we'll see some stuff on liability, although maybe liability just be left alone and it'll be fine. And then I do think because of some of the possibility of doing work around kids, it may be that the companion chatbot issue rises up. And then of course there's data centers, which is a little bit tricky because it's primarily a state and local issue, but there may well be some sort of federal pieces that can work on it. All that said, I think the other factor in this is I think companies, and OpenAI has already signaled this, are going to become pro-regulation. The way they were in the early days of the generative AI breakthrough moment.

They're going to come pro-regulation with super light touch regulation coupled with preemption and preempting state liability rules and regulations I think will be worth it to them to accept some really modest federal stuff. We're very worried about that deal kind of being ushered through, and I think it's certainly a thing for folks to be watching.

It is interesting how many folks, and more than one of you have alluded to this in this conversation, how many folks expect there to be some kind of catastrophe related to artificial intelligence in the near term? We've already seen various incidents, but perhaps nothing that quite rises to the level of catastrophe, but a lot of folks seem to suggest that is in the offing that something like that will come along. I'm interested in things like we have one questioner in the Q&A who's asked about the AI Agent Act that Senator Warner [D-Va.] put forward. Other legislation that you all are looking at or have seen that you think deserves a kind of second look in the first part of the year that would potentially address some of the concerns that could lead to a catastrophe. Anybody got anything else they're either championing or watching closely?

Yeah, on the question of catastrophic risks, I mean in our field it's been a highly loaded term because it has felt very much like a debate between either you are focused on catastrophic risks, which historically was extinction level, very significant mass incidents, or you're worried about current harms, which include privacy and kids and pricing and all of the things that we've been talking about. I firmly believe that we are seeing a convergence in those fields because the catastrophic risks are actually materializing not in this abstract sci-fi way. I'm not yet thinking about AI as running small city states, and I don't think that's not a good use of CDT's time. Some philosophers and professors can talk about that. But when we are seeing these cyber incidents and the increasing risk created by agents that are operating on the web, that are discovering vulnerabilities on the web, that therefore can exploit those vulnerabilities in ways that could lead to systems failure, those are now also becoming current harms.

And I don't think it is hyperbolic to say so. It's actually not buying into a hype cycle from the companies. It is actually where the evidence is going and the accountability conversation needs to go with that too. So I personally feel very much that groups like ours that have been thinking about governance and accountability and transparency and all of these elements need to be engaging on those risks as well because again, they're immediate, they are happening, and they probably are going to be the thing that most forces the political conversation in the near term if something like that materializes. It's also where you're seeing powerful actors, the deployer community, the financial services industry, critical infrastructure, all saying we need help and accountability and more resilience in that space. And I think we ignore that call at our peril because it is actually an important moment to think about the structures of responsibility and accountability that's needed for this new technological wave.

In terms of the things we're watching, it is still really important that we address those risks and we do not let that be at the exclusion of the very serious other risks to fairness, to privacy, to mental health and other places like that. And so the question is going to be, can we have legislative vehicles as well as an oversight agenda that is sufficiently capacious to address all of the ways in which AI is touching people's lives? I think we can, I think we have to, but that is going to have to be the demand of policymakers to not make it this false choice of one or the other or you only deal with this one harm. We have multiple committees with multiple jurisdiction for a reason and we have advocacy groups that can focus on different pieces of the puzzle. I do think the Frontier Act is obviously one of the places that this conversation is kind of organizing around and that's important.

It's also important to make sure that these solutions are durable and effective and have democratic accountability. I think one of the things that I've been most worried about watching things unfold over the past six months is this notion that safety and model releases just gets decided by the White House under a veil of secrecy. We have known and we have seen firsthand over the past couple of years if you needed a reminder from the lessons of history that that is not a good wielding of power and that it could easily feed into corruption and abuse and lack of public legitimacy. So we're watching his proposals and also really thinking about the democratic legitimacy and durability of those solutions. But at the same time, again, we can't ignore all of the other sector specific efforts that are going to need to happen as well, whether it's automatic decision making, the privacy pieces, fraud and abuse, and other areas like that.

I think I might pick up a couple of questions from the Q&A that ask you all to focus a little more in on the states. There are a couple of different questions here and some that are kind of asking what to anticipate from the new balance of power across state houses, what we can expect in terms of state AI governance and legislation. There's another question really asking about this balance of power with the federal government on preemption. Of course, the Trump administration has created this unit, the DOJ that's supposed to go out and sue the states if they pass laws that they don't like. I don't know, what do we expect just in the near term from, in some cases, newly or new trifectas across various states? Rob, maybe I'll start with you on that one.

Yeah, I think the states have been super active and the shift towards Democrats may superpower it, supercharge it, but it's been a very lively space and I think it's responsive to what's happening and that the state legislators themselves are seeing and hearing about. So I think we're going to see accelerated action, particularly one that we're focusing on, but also where there's a ton of interest is on chatbots, the automated license readers and the Flock issue is exploding everywhere. I think we're going to see more versions of data center moratoriums or close equivalents, and I think a lot of other sort of innovations. California is really working on the AI safety issue. States may try to take down on that really is a hard one for states to have capacity to manage, and so we'll see. But I think it's going to be very aggressive in the states.

And I think that, again, I'm really worried about the federal preempt, because I don't think the Congress is going to catch up. The idea that a Congress might catch up by preempting all that the states are doing and then not do much else is very worrisome, including because I think Alex is getting exactly right in talking about both the AI safety issue itself and also its relationship to the other set of issues. I mean, we have to just have some humility about this technology that's moving super fast and thinking that we're able to, at a moment in time, come up with a regulatory structure that's going to manage it and deal with the safety issues where the technology is both complicated, the companies pushing it are as irresponsible as any company in the history of the universe. We need to be humble and not think that there's going to be a single solution around it.

And that is one reason that you just can't have the federal government preempting the states. And it's another reason we have to be really creative in thinking about what Congress does when it finally gets to this because you don't get too many bites at the apple. And once the structure is created, that's kind of what we have to live with. And particularly against the backdrop of a Supreme Court that says administrative agencies can't really evolve the authorities they have. It's going to have to be open-ended and doing a lot of learning from the last 75 years of regulatory experience and broad and humble and recognizing your humility about understanding what's going on and therefore conferring a lot of authority on a new agency to be able to do things that we can't yet anticipate are problems or necessities.

Yeah, and I think that the state landscape is really exciting. It's probably where you're going to see legislative proposals move forward that are unlikely to move forward at the federal level. I mean protections around worker surveillance, worker privacy, guardrails on the use of AI in the public sector, in education, consumer protection, algorithm discrimination. On the specific issue of data centers, which is so royal this electoral cycle, I mean I think this is going to be really interesting at the state level because it will be a real-time test case of that distinction between politics and policy of how far really are electeds willing to go. And I think this is where sustained organizing and sustained activism is going to be key because if that falls away, absent that, you may well have something like the lowest common denominator where lawmakers say, "We hear you and we're going to do these sort of requirements for companies to bring their own diesel generation on site, largely milquetoast things." And this really will be a test case.

The states are the laboratories of democracy. It kind of is like a laboratory for seeing how far some of this data center politics can convert into real governance.

The other thing I'd jump in, we've been talking about the legislative landscape, but the state AGs have been running the table recently in terms of tech governance through litigation, securing blockbuster wins that in a way creates a political precedent that you're a dummy if you're not also seeking a $25 billion award or settlement for your state through this litigation. That's being a little bit flippant, but it is a notable trend that we have really seen an uptick in recent years. And that's it's kid safety, it's privacy. Recently eight states suing OpenAI over the chatbot liability and AI liability pieces of this. And that I think is going to continue to dominate the trends, not least because some of this liability stuff is actually very difficult to legislate in writing about apportionment of liability. And so litigation is actually, I think, going to be setting a lot of the norms.

Evie Breese is a UK Reporting Fellow at Tech Policy Press and openDemocracy.

The day Google DeepMind research engineer Sofia Liguori returned to work following the birth of her first child was the day her activism began.

The 32-year-old was part of the London-based frontier AI lab’s sustainability-focused Impact Accelerator team, tasked with identifying new ways the technology can be used for good. These range “from pathogen detection and crop resilience to medical countermeasure acceleration”, according to a 

Liguori’s own project focused on how AI could optimize electricity power flow to allow the national grid to use less energy and reduce overall carbon emissions. She told openDemocracy she now refers to her work as “building the nice face of the devil”.

“I felt so hypocritical that we were just talking about all these good things and not even mentioning Project Nimbus”, she said, speaking to openDemocracy from her home in south London, a Palestinian Keffiyeh scarf draped on the wall behind her.

 that Google and Amazon Web Services signed with Israel to build data centres in the country and provide public entities with cloud-based data storage in 2021. The 

 stipulated that neither company could shut down their services in Israel or deny them to particular government entities.

Google has said its work with Israel is “not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services”, as a spokesperson told 

 magazine this year. Yet training materials leaked to The Intercept in 2022 revealed the 

 are available to Israeli state departments, including the Ministry of Defense, for face detection, object tracking and “sentiment analysis.”

The ministry could have used these tools to 

 Palestinians across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, including since 7 October 2023, according to reporting in the New York Times and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Israeli military officials have said they have killed 

 in Gaza since the Hamas attack on October 7 2023 that killed approximately 

As she sat at home with her new baby, Liguori said she “watched a live-streamed genocide for a year, knowing that my company was complicit”. She added: “If we accepted this modus operandi, we were basically legitimizing what has been tested in Gaza to become the standard.”

Returning to work in August last year, she said she implored her colleagues: “If our aim is AI for good, trying to stop genocide is one of the ultimate goods we can do, right?”

32-year-old new mother Sophia Liguori left her AI research engineer role at Google DeepMind in protest of the firm's products being used for AI warfare and surveillance. Image: Supplied

Ultimately, having been unable to convince executives to end Google’s role in Israeli military actions, Liguori left the company this year. In recent weeks, she has acted as a whistleblower, speaking out despite being subject to the strict lifetime non-disparagement agreement signed by Google employees.

Liguroi had always been prepared to be fired for her activism, but, she said, the real risk of “being sued by Google is different”. The tech giant’s parent company, Alphabet, is consistently ranked as the third or fourth most valuable globally, with a reported market worth of around $3.5trn.

This week, she was delivered some good news: a Google executive told the company’s UK staff that it will not enforce the NDA’s clause against workers who criticize the company after leaving. Speaking to openDemocracy after the news was announced, Liguori details what it took to get Google to back down.

Liguori, whose background is in theoretical physics and reinforcement learning for video games, told openDemocracy she never set out to work with frontier AI models and knew “nothing” about Project Nimbus when she joined Google DeepMind in May 2023.

After becoming increasingly aware of the project’s impact in Gaza while on maternity leave, Liguori sent her immediate colleagues a letter urging them to take action shortly after she returned to work in August last year.

“This team is full of mothers,” she wrote. “I am not going to describe how it feels to become a mother for the first time while watching snipers targeting children, children dying of starvation, and all the rest of the horrors. What’s happening is lacerating my heart, really.”

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