The Tech Policy Press Podcast

On June 4, Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) released a 269-page bipartisan discussion draft of a bill called the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act of 2026. On the same date, they published an opinion in Bloomberg Law calling for feedback on the draft. “This discussion draft isn’t a final product,” they wrote. “It’s the start of a serious national conversation with workers, researchers, startups, frontier labs, educators, civil society, state leaders, and the American people.” Rep. Trahan joined the podcast to discuss the draft and some of the early criticism levied against it from civil society groups.

On June 12, SpaceX will reportedly offer 555,555,555 shares at $135 apiece in an initial public offering. The IPO is expected to give SpaceX a market value of $1.77 trillion, instantly making it one of the most valuable companies in the world. When combined with his holdings in Tesla, the IPO may also make SpaceX founder Elon Musk—already the world’s richest man—the world’s first trillionaire.
Today’s guests are Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The book considers its subject as a specimen of the current geopolitical moment, promising an “examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age.”

Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer of Mozilla, has spent the past few months building an argument that the central question in AI isn't open versus closed, but owning versus renting—whether AI becomes something we control or something we lease from a handful of companies. A technologist by background with stops at Twitter, Uber, and the Democratic National Committee, he writes about all of this in his newsletter, Owners Not Renters, and in other outlets, most recently in a New York Times op-ed on what he called the "Mythos moment."
Justin Hendrix spoke to him about the idea that generosity is the hidden infrastructure of the internet, how to expand access to powerful AI tools rather than closing it down for security's sake, how to overcome misaligned incentives to build a better information environment, how to counter surveillance, and why those concerned with AI governance should spend more time thinking about the protocol and harness layers.

As Brussels prepares to unveil a tech sovereignty package on June 3, the political tone around Europe’s digital infrastructure is shifting. A recent investigation by Investigate Europe, published with partners including Tech Policy Press, shows that a confidentiality clause inserted into an EU regulation after industry lobbying allows companies to keep site-level data center energy and water use out of public view, and many operators are not reporting at all. The finding highlights a disconnect between policy ambition and oversight.
What does expanding “technological sovereignty” with real accountability look like in practice? To explore this, Tech Policy Press senior editor Ramsha Jahangir spoke with Nico Schmidt, the journalist behind the Investigate Europe report, and Christiaan van Veen of Leitmotiv, a Dutch research and policy consultancy that has analyzed data center permit filings in the Netherlands.

In this episode, we reflect on the 19th edition of CPDP (Computers, Privacy and Data Protection), the major Brussels tech policy conference, held last week under this year's theme, "Competing Visions, Shared Futures." We discuss the dominant debates from the gathering, including the contested Digital Omnibus simplification package, digital and tech sovereignty, researcher access to platform data under the Digital Services Act, the rising prominence of child online safet
We feature voices from across the conference, including Tech Policy Press contributing editor Mark Scott, AlgorithmWatch's Oliver Marsh, the Knight-Georgetown Institute's Peter Chapman, the Center for Democracy and Technology's Marie Seck, Project SENTIMENT's Joel Baumann, Mozilla's Svea Windwehr, and conference director Barbara Lazarotto.
And, you’ll hear two interviews: a conversation with European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski on whether the GDPR needs reform amid the simplification push, and a wide-ranging reflection from CPDP founder Paul De Hert on how the conference and the field of data protection have evolved over nearly two decades, the value of reasoned disagreement, and why Europe should be more self-critical.