Derek Robertson

Washington is getting ready to run a wild experiment, testing what happens when one of Silicon Valley’s signature “disruptors” meets the world’s biggest bureaucracy. Elon Musk showed up in person in the capita the day after Donald Trump named him to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency”—an initiative to slash government waste, fraud, and inefficiency, wherever the tech mogul might decide he finds it. Musk will co-lead the project with Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor and MAGA cheerleader who ran against Trump in the GOP primary. Trump unveiled the idea with his usual lavish prom

Gail Slater, Sen. JD Vance’s economic policy adviser, and Michael Kratsios, Donald Trump’s chief technology officer during his first term, will head tech policy for the transition. Kratsios helped pen the Trump administration’s 2020 AI executive order, which emphasized research investment, federal computing resources, and training the U.S. AI workforce.

Of all the groups celebrating Donald Trump’s reelection, maybe no one has more of a reason to celebrate than his boosters in the tech world.

Former President Donald Trump will return to the White House, bringing his retrofuturistic, tech-friendly, pro-industrial vision for America’s future with him.

Tech-world insiders are getting more involved than ever in national politics this year—and it’s not just Elon Musk. But as the presidential election looms, there’s a major disconnect between American politics and Big Tech when it comes to their visions of America’s future.

Elon Musk made an explicitly future-forward pitch to Pennsylvania voters Saturday—arguing that a vote for former President Donald Trump was a vote for the progress of humanity itself. Musk has spoken at length about his desire for humanity to become a “spacefaring civilization” and colonize Earth’s moon or Mars, even specifying which type of government he thinks would fit an off-world colony (direct democracy). He’s been equally specific about what kind of government he thinks is necessary on Earth to enable that future, namely, one that will ease up on regulating his vast business empire.

Meta has always insisted that building the “metaverse” is a long-term play, but a flashy recent demo from Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated just how immediate a policy concern it might become if people really start to inhabit virtual reality at scale. At Meta’s annual Connect conference, Zuckerberg strode onstage to demonstrate the company’s prototype Orion augmented reality glasses.

Top officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, the National Economic Council, and private industry all dropped by downtown Washington for the POLITICO AI & Tech Summit on September 17. And with the first presidential election of the generative AI era a mere seven weeks away, much of their attention was turned to ensuring its security and trustworthiness. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) described how artificial intelligence demands a response from each sector of government.

Kara Frederick, the Heritage Foundation’s director of tech policy, on her sweeping vision for re-imagining how conservatives relate to tech, including low earth orbit satellites (LEOs), Smart Cities, and generative artificial intelligence. She spoke about what the government could be doing but isn't, saying "Having a national data protection framework is also, to me, an extremely common-sense measure.

California recently lawmakers sent a nationally consequential artificial intelligence bill to Gov.