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

On Friday, September 11, I moderated a discussion at the 

Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs

 at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC as part of 

 called “Getting Tech Right US China Policy for a New Era.” Amid a frenzy of headlines about AI safety and just two weeks out from a planned meeting of US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping, the discussion was organized around the question, what does AI governance actually demand right now? Joining me were:

, SAIS ACF and the Center for a New American Security

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

My name's Justin Hendrix. I'm CEO and editor of a site called Tech Policy Press, which focuses on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy. I'm normally based in New York City. And when I talk about things happening in the specter of the US Capitol, it's not literally right above my shoulder. So this is a great pleasure to be here and I'm thankful to the organizers for inviting me to help moderate what I think will be a very great session today. 

And I'm also planning to use the audio from this conversation for the Tech Policy Press podcast. So I have a kind of habit on the podcast of making sure we do an audio check and let people announce themselves, say their names out loud. That helps me to avoid butchering pronunciations when I do my podcast recording. So I'm going to stick with that and I'm going to just go down the line and ask folks to state their name, their title, and their affiliation so that everyone knows where you're hailing from.

I'm Miro Plueckebaum. I'm the strategy and research manager at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative. And I also run a Singapore and London based technical AI governance research lab called SASH. And

I'm Kat as in meow, Duffy as in Duff Beer on the Simpsons. And I am a senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. And I'm also the director of our LEAD AI initiative.

I'm Amba Kak. I'm the co-executive director of the AI Now Institute.

Jack Shanahan, retired United States Air Force, but thanks to Afra, I'm not going to say that anymore. I'm an OPC. I'm a one person company. So I'm very proud of that. I am a senior fellow with ACF, but also an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security.

Well, I'm looking forward to this conversation today. We've got a range of perspectives, but I felt maybe I'd start with just reading a couple of headlines and I almost just randomly chose these from my newsfeed. But one of the things that folks have been talking about in the communities I travel in has been just this sort of frenetic pace of news, the frenzy of information, the kind of wild set of events that have taken place over the last couple of weeks, which if you cover tech and you do journalism, at any point in past, any one of these stories would've seemed as if it would occupy days or weeks or months of discourse, and yet they sort of fall away almost as instantly as they're published. But headlines like the Wall Street Journal, “Anthropic says Iran used its American AI model to target US Navy warships.” The Financial Times, “Houthis used Anthropic AI to try to build ballistic missiles”. CNBC, “Extinction warnings ramp up as more OpenAI, Anthropic researchers join calls for an AI slowdown”. And then maybe a little closer to the Capitol here. Politico, “Hawley presses OpenAI over rogue Hugging Face hack.” And finally, Wall Street Journal, “Congress is suddenly waking up to the AI doomsday threat.”

I literally could have drawn any number of headlines like this from the last couple of weeks. But the organizers, if you go back to what they wanted from us for this panel, they wanted us to offer a kind of a possible affirmative vision for AI governance, what we should do, what AI governance demands now. And yet we know that just down the street, senators, Congress, congressional representatives are apparently in a flutter. They're putting out bills rapidly. They're trying to draft legislation in some cases in response to these headlines.

So my first question for you all, and in fact, I'd like to put China out of our minds for just a moment. If you were to walk down there, walk down the street, short clip and tell folks what they should be doing to get AI governance right, right now, what would you emphasize? What would be the thing that you would say should be the kind of framing thought? 

And perhaps Kat, I'll put you on the spot to go first.

Yeah. For a year, I've had a series of AI agents I've consistently been refining to help pull in all the news that I need to see. And now even the agents can't keep up with the news cycle. They're like, "You only wanted me to surface 15 things. What do you want me to do?" I mean, I think putting China out of the equation, the most important thing I think we should be asking ourselves is what is America best at? If America is going to lead in this technological transformation, we're arguably going to lead best by relying on our strengths and leaning into those strengths. And historically our strengths have sat in openness, in due process, in accountability, in supporting innovation, in supporting incredible influxes of talent and in recruiting that talent in. And so I would say that a lot of what we needed to be doing with AI governance right now is sort of returning to the fundamentals.

I think American citizens need to have a better understanding of the way that this technology is being developed. I think they should have a much better understanding of the way that it's being financed. We have massive amounts of opacity in our private capital and venture capital flows in private equity. Americans don't know who's funding what, where that money is coming from, nor frankly, do many of the innovators know who is funding them or who is funding their work. There's no transparency on this at all. Americans don't know what their tax dollars are going to and what they may not be going to. I think when you see the concerns right now about data centers and the impacts of those data centers, you're also seeing, for example, the data center in Memphis that was really producing terrible results for the populations close to it, that was also a result of permitting processes that had been shortcut.

So it wasn't that the permitting process didn't exist or that the governance didn't exist that would've made that data center more safe for the community. It's that there was such a rush that the permitting and the governance that was already in place to protect citizens was thrown by the wayside on the altar of supporting this technology. And so that's where I would say let's return to where we're best to begin with.

Okay. So transparency and embracing some of those principles that have made America America in your view. Amba, what about you? What would you emphasize to the folks down on Capitol Hill right now what AI governance demands?

Can I do one second of throat clearing first, which is I think there's at least one person in the audience that agrees with me. I can't see him anymore, but it feels like every time Sam and Jessica, you organize these conversations, they really do feel like a refuge from every other conversation happening outside this room. The most optimistic note I guess I can strike at this moment is that it does feel like the distance between the conversation or the kinds of discourse we're trying to advance in this room feels less further away than it has at many points before. I was thinking this morning that when Ted Cruz comes out in the midst of this news cycle to say that they'd rather it be our killer robots than China's, I do think we've got - 

He needs to think about that one just for a second.

It didn't land well. It didn't land well. I think there is a visceral mainstream backlash to just the ridiculousness of the race to the bottom logics that have been perpetuated around this frame. And so that's the good news. Maybe the flip side is you never waste a crisis is maybe the most important policy adage, but equally I think not every policy crisis is equal in the opportunity it creates. And what I'm sitting with in this moment is that the nature of the extinction risk whistleblower moment that we're in right now, it seems like all roads are in fact leading to a policy imagination that looks straight back at the industry for answers to problems that they are creating. And that is what maybe gets us closer to, are we going to waste this crisis or even worse, are we going to undercut all of the public momentum that has come not just from tech whistleblowers, but from data center activism, from parents groups?

Is that going to be undercut towards a policy regime that is essentially functioning as a checkbox certification legitimization of business as usual rather than real accountability and real oversight? And there's many ways in which this is happening. I think the fact that the Bernie Sanders Kassar bill hinges on a definition of super intelligence that is frankly undefinable and would leave most of industry off the hook is a good sign, like the smell test that something is off with that line of that sort of solution being what we see from this or what we make of this crisis. Okay.

So a lot of threads there, but put super intelligence out of our minds, focus on what the public needs, the public interest rather than the corporate interest. Lots there, but we can come back. Miro, what about you? What does AI governance demand now maybe with your verification hat on?

Well, the examples you gave to kind of set us up already illustrated that the stakes are really rising. AI systems are becoming more powerful. The harm they can do is increasing, but so are competitive pressures between companies. The prize is starting to feel quite real now, regardless of what you think of the valuation of companies being overvalued or not. The valuations are no longer imagined. They're actually generating quite a bit of revenue. And what that means is that in cases where companies do want to behave responsibly, they may get penalized by the market. So you mentioned briefly the Hugging Face incident in the introduction. In that case, OpenAI tried to act responsibly and pause the training of the model for a period of two weeks. Now in this case, they chose to do it unilaterally. No other company paused, but we can't be living in a system where the responsible actor can't behave responsibly because they have to worry about their competitors undercutting them.

So if I were to walk down the street, I would ask folks to start thinking about what type of a regime can we build that allows responsible actors to behave as such when required without being undercut by actors that may not want to behave as responsibly. And that's an open policy question. We're focusing on building tools that can verify whether or not actors have, for example, actually paused, but at what point we ought to pause and for how long and what others should do is a question that we need folks down the road to help figure out.

Okay. Jack Shanahan, I know you've worked directly on these questions around US and China, but again, keeping China off the table for the moment. If you were to go down the hill, AI governance, what does it demand now?

Well, first thing I'll do is go back to ground zero, so to speak, on September 11th and redefine what do we mean by governance in the first place? To me, it's rules of the road. I spent 36 years in the military. I can't remember ever using the word governance, but governance ruled everything we did. We called it policy, we called it directives. What are you allowed to do, what you can't do, what you can do under certain circumstances, who is held responsible and accountable when something happened? All those things were what I call rules of the road. We need that in AI in a way that we just haven't had before. This will be a little bit provocative. I'm not sure people would disagree with it, you might take exception with certain ways. I'll say this, but at the end of the Cold War, we entered into a period of unfettered technological libertarianism.

The government was not in the equation with what was going on in Silicon Valley. The government wasn't the customer for these companies. They raced out in front of everybody else. The government didn't understand the technology, had no interest in figuring out how to govern it properly. And the next thing you know, here we are today and people saying, we blinked twice, we look around and this technology's outraced all of us. So now is the time to reset and say, what are the rules of the road? Some of you may be familiar with the term Collingridge dilemma. I am very sympathetic to the Hill in many respects is you move too fast on a technology and try to put out policy, you move too fast, it's the wrong policy and you screwed something up. You wait too long, the technology has taken root. Now what are you going to do about it?

It's really hard to get it in past a certain point. I think people are very serious on the hill about trying to find where is the right time to come in. I think we all sense that that time is now. These incidents are just making it clear to everybody, if you don't act now, something serious is going to happen and we're all going to regret that. So for me, it is a very basic term. It is rules of the road. That's a very easy statement for a lot of different things that have to be done to get it right.

So I want to pick up on the point of time. It's really the second thing I wanted to get to a little bit. The question has been somewhat, is there going to be some major event that finally gets everybody off the couch and to take action? It does seem like right now maybe there are lots of important things that are happening or frightening things that are happening that together people are beginning out there in the real world. Normally people who don't think about AI policy every day are piecing together in their mind and they're building their own imagination for is this a crisis? I don't know. How long do we think we've got to take advantage of a sort of push towards there needing to do something and how do we avoid doing something when perhaps in some ways we should have done nothing? How do we avoid making mistakes in this moment?

Does anyone have a general view on that? How do we take advantage of the moment without somehow, I don't know, making a mistake in the process?

My initial reaction when the first part of your question is when will that crisis arrive or when will we be there? And I think we're there. The question is no longer are we there yet to the crisis that opens up the political window. The policy window is before us. And maybe the best evidence of that is the fact that with, I think no exception today, every single AI firm is standing up to support in theory the prospect of regulation. The terms though are the ones that I think the fight right now is about who is going to sort of set the terms of the debate. Is it, as Jack is saying, going to be this sort of amorphous notion, to me, a softer notion of governance which really is often self-governance in other clothing or is it going to be much more straightforward leverage that the public can actually assert over this industry?

And I think that looks like rules. It looks like liability. It looks like the hard, the concrete enforceable rules. It also looks, to be honest, for one, let's start with making sure we're not wiping off the rules that do exist off the books because that's as a sort of reality check. We're at a moment where in the last few years we have seen AI exceptionalism that I think no industry has had it this good in some ways. So it isn't just no new rules for this industry. There have been several attempts, moratorium in many different shapes and forms, pushes to try to immunize this industry from even adhering to the law as it exists on the books. So the DOJ is stepping up in the New York Times case, also in the Memphis permitting case, and their argument is China, that if the US is to hold national security advantages, then whether it's unpermitted turbines in Memphis or a copyright suit, you cannot touch the AI industry.

And I feel like that the moment to reckon with or challenge that premise is here, but my sort of anxiety and also optimism is like, can we make the best go at it?

If I could jump in, I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning about this time element where you read these headlines just from the last, what, 48 hours, 72 hours. What makes this technology so different than I think with anything any of us have experienced in the past is the time you would have to actually work on things where now you've got this accelerated rate of development, this breadth and depth and diffusion and this rate of adoption that is so different than anything before. It feels like that yes, the time is now to do something, but the pace is so brutally relentless that human nature says, no, no, give us some time to focus on the headlines you just read. Then the next thing is about to happen. And maybe it's only when that catastrophic event happens that we really do see action.

We wish I could be, I know you want to leave on an optimist note, so maybe we'll get there eventually, but at heart here, the signs are not really great for solving these problems right now with regulation until something else really changed, whether that's the election, whether it's a catastrophic event. But I think this time pressure is different than technologies that we have experienced in the past.

Kat, Miro, this time pressure, anything to say?

I mean, look, if you're on the hill, your time pressure is the midterms, right? I mean, if you're looking to people to govern over the next few months as opposed to run, I wouldn't hold your breath.

And so it may be less the crises that should be responded to because those aren't necessarily the crises that the electorate is going to hook to as being their kitchen table issue, their thing that they would go to the ballot for. What's really interesting is the polling that's been coming out that is showing that unprecedented amounts of agreement across evangelical Christians and liberal progressives absolutely polling at the same numbers and like 80% use of AI in K-12 education. There are going to be these issues that I think when those of us who are foreign policy thinkers or operate in the NATSEC space and cyber, those other areas, I think are underestimating potentially what Americans are going to be most concerned about. And that type of polling in the lead up to elections between that and the data centers, if I were saying where I think governance might sit or governance proposals might sit, I suspect it will sit in wherever electability sits, not necessarily in where the triaging actual crisis does sit or should sit.

I'm not as policy savvy as my fellow panelists, but just one observation that I'm going to make in a personal capacity in response to the way you framed the question, you said, how do we avoid doing something wrong? And that implies some sort of hesitancy over what to do from the policy point of view. And it's not something I sense a lot from the private sector. The adage is move fast and break things. And on the policy side, it seems to be much more hand-wringy and hesitant. And if policy wants to keep pace with technology, it needs to perhaps move into a much more fast moving, iterative direction where it is understood that you're just not going to get it right every single time, but you need to be able to adjust very quickly on the fly in response to a changing landscape as the companies are doing.

I mean, they're very much playing to win. They're not just. Yeah. So that's just a quick observation there as someone who's, again, not very policy savvy. Well,

And I think it's a good observation and those of us who've worked on tech policy issues, perhaps one of the things that's working against us is that we are convinced that if a law passes, for instance, we should be prepared to live with it for 40 years because nothing is going to change in the intervening time. That seems to be what we all operate on. But let me now kind of bring the China question back in because Amba mentioned, for instance, the DOJ's effective support for Elon Musk's xAI in Memphis, the argument effectively that we can't really expect to hold xAI to account for poisoning the air in this Black community in Boxtown in South Memphis because we've got to beat Beijing. Because

That's right. Let's bring China back in. Let's bring the question back in. How does that change anything about your prior suggestion about what AI governance demands now? How does that inform? And Jack, with this one, I'll start with you.

This is a conversation Paul Triolo and I were having last night based on watching his podcast last week with Kendra Schaefer on this very topic is to have this governance conversation between the United States and China, which I think is absolutely essential. I can't question that question is what does it look like? But to do that, we have to get our own governance house in order and China has to get its own governance house in order. This is not arms control is owned by this one organization in respective countries. It's AI that brings in everything. It brings commerce, it brings treasury, brings in defense, it brings in state. Keep going down the list and the equivalents in China. So first of all, it's a very complicated, messy piece to go down the road of who are we talking to? Why are we talking about it? Exactly what are we going to be talking about?

These are issues that I hope are being resolved. I'm not seeing a lot in the public discussion about on the road to the 24th September meeting, but there is no better time to get going on a conversation. Why would two AI superpowers, do these two AI superpowers want to have this conversation in the first place? I think you start there. We have mutual vulnerabilities and mutual risks when it comes to AI. Without those, I think all you're doing is having trade-based conversations about trade imbalances, tariffs, and all the things that we have been doing vis-a-vis US and China. Now with this technology is showing capacity to do things that are troubling people globally, there is no better opportunity to get going on the conversation, but you can't do that unless you get your own governance house in order. I don't know if we have that in order yet.

So if I were to say worst case, it's actually not the worst case. The worst case is not talking at all. The sort of less worse is we just go in and get started. Okay, that's all right as a starting point, but it can't be a one-off conversation. This is going to be an institutional dial. Let the track twos do all the work that track twos and many people in this room may be familiar with or involved in track twos. They're there to do a lot of the homework before the track ones get going. In this case, I guess the last thing I'll say is track one by itself isn't going to be sufficient because these are technology companies, unlike any other technology that we've worked in the military in the past. The technology companies have to be involved in the conversation exactly how they are, who they are.

Those are big questions that have to be addressed both in China and in the United States. But I don't see how you have a very fruitful conversation on AI governance without the technical expertise to go along with the policy expertise. Those have been two different circles that need to be a Venn diagram before we get into really good conversations on governance between the US and China.

So maybe before we move on from you, how confident are you that there's a lot of folks who are wondering about what will happen in the next couple of weeks. It's not even clear. Is it clear yet if we're actually having an AI dialogue? We don't really know, do we?

I don't. I hear rumors. I hear things as they say in New York. I hear things. Something will come out of this. So there is no question. I don't think there's any question. AI will be on the agenda when the two presidents meet. How much will be done in advance of that? I feel not so great about that, although some people are telling me, nah, some work is going on, you just don't see it. Okay, that's fine. Now we'll see what happens. More likely to me is September 24th comes and goes, then there's an agreement for the two sides to get together. Now you start looking at what are the parameters of the dialogue? Is there a separate mil-to-mil talk? I mean, all those things can be worked out. I just see the appetite still is there, but the release of the distillation report followed by China's reaction to that felt like, oh no, are we about to say talks are off?

I don't think that's the case. People are telling me, no, no, they're still on track, but I will be surprised. If I'm wrong, please blast me on LinkedIn or somewhere. I'd love to be wrong. I don't see something really substantive happening before September 24th. Today is the 11th. We have two weeks.

Kat, you move in similar circles in New York international diplomacy. What are you hearing?

I concur entirely. I think another way that I've been thinking about it is what could come out of the dialogue on September 24th where that announcement or the execution of whatever was promised, the entire world would essentially be in agreement. Xi and Trump deserve to share a Nobel Peace Prize for that. What would win them a joint Nobel Peace Prize? Where the entire world would be like, thank God that they work together on that. We are all safer. We are all better for it. And to Jack's point, there are mutual interests that sit exactly in that category. What is coming out in terms of biohazards is terrifying. All of the work that happens in CBRN, in chemical warfare, what's happening with our lack of ability right now to do truly comprehensive good faith threat sharing among frontier companies. And it can't just be the American frontier companies.

We need true cooperation in key areas. And that is, I truly wish that you could take Trump's top three advisors, Xi's top three advisors, put them in a room and say, think of everything that could win them a Nobel Prize. Start the conversations there and then move backwards.

Amba, can you see that Nobel Prize coming?

No, I can't claim to be an expert on that piece of it.

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People participate in a march to protest the opening of AI data centers, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Saturday, June 27, 2026. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)


The frenzy of headlines about AI safety over the past several days has made it difficult to keep up. From countless items in the Anthropic 

 that spawned headlines that in years past might have eaten up an entire news cycle on their own (see “

Anthropic Says Iran Used Its American AI Model to Target US Navy Warships

Houthis used Anthropic AI to try to build ballistic missiles

Anthropic blocks possible attempt to use AI to make biological weapons

 by a swarm of OpenAI agents (this one took place before the now famous Hugging Face incident), it appears to many to be a 

, as the destabilizing effects of releasing these products into the world without constraints become apparent.

But perhaps nowhere is the discussion over AI ‘doomsday’ more pronounced than 

 themselves, where executives and developers are expressing their vivid imaginations about what might happen next. On Saturday, Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei published another in his series of occasional blog posts to address the crisis, “

.” “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” writes Amodei. “To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” he writes.

What does he propose specifically? First is “giving ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators,” which he says Anthropic is “unilaterally committing to” now. Second is coordination in democratic countries “to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.” And third is that the US and other democratic countries should “attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.”

In response to Amodei’s post, tech leaders including OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman and his nemesis, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, 

. Another person to generally endorse the call was David Sacks, the investor, former Trump administration AI and crypto czar, and current co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. “If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible,” wrote Sacks in a post on X. But, he added:

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Sacks’ perspective may not fully align with that of President Donald Trump, who says he is 

 and is focused on staying ahead of China. And it is unclear what, if anything, may happen in Congress, where lawmakers are 

 to advance legislation before the US midterm elections. (House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., 

 it is the duty of companies, not Congress, to make AI safe.) Either way, tech politics has gone mainstream, as former 

 to make AI a central concern if the party wins the House in the midterms, and in the 2028 race for President.

In the near term, though, another open question is the extent to which these issues will be discussed when (

) Trump meets with China’s President Xi Jinping in Washington 

. That planned summit was in the fore of discussion Friday at an event I attended in Washington, D.C. at the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS on Pennsylvania Avenue. I moderated a discussion (

Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, and 

from SAIS ACF and the Center for a New American Security.

We covered a lot of ground in the discussion, which was focused on what AI governance demands in the immediate term. 

 made the case for returning to American strengths in transparency, due process and accountability. 

 warned against letting the current crisis produce checkbox certification rather than real oversight. 

 discussed his work on technical tools to verify whether labs and states are doing what they claim. And 

 argued for the necessity of defining "rules of the road" before turning to what a Trump-Xi meeting on AI could realistically produce. We also discussed the 

 and what it shows about the potential to collaborate on cross-border threats, China's own comparatively aggressive AI regulation, the fraying of the arms-race narrative, the role investors and stock exchanges might play in governing the industry, and more.

We’ll have more on these issues in the week ahead. Read on for more from Tech Policy Press this week.

Based on interviews across 24 countries in 7 regions of the world for a report from the Berkeley Human Rights Center, 

 call on AI developers conducting evaluations to consider how geopolitics, resource and access disparities, and other factors 

Internet governance and AI governance communities have largely stayed separate. 

, senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Democracy and Tech Initiative, and 

Humane Intelligence Public Benefit Corporation, make the case that they must come together to 

 for an internet increasingly driven by AI agent interactions. “The Internet did not become a global public resource because it was designed for autonomous machines. It became one because its architecture allowed different networks, technologies and communities to interoperate while leaving room for human choice,” they write.

 don't have lobbyists. Tech policy strategist 

 on why that capacity gap will decide whether the next wave of state AI bills protects openness or accidentally kills it. “The lesson is not that “open” should be exempt from regulation, but that obligations should reflect an actor’s actual knowledge and control rather than broadly requiring developers to monitor and control downstream uses,” he writes.

The scale, speed and coordination of AI-assisted disinformation are outpacing the mechanisms designed to counter them. 

 a Fulbright Taiwan Fellow pursuing a master's degree at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, writes that 

, an associate professor in Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication and an academic director at Re.Climate, and 

, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, examine how Canada's current 

 struggles to secure autonomy for institutions reliant on US tech — and that is most institutions in Canada. “A middle power approach to tech accepts an inability to compel platform and AI companies to align with Canadian values, principles, and laws,” they write.

AI’s environmental risks: The data center dilemma

If data center industry insiders understood the financial incentives of sustainability, they would 

, director of partnerships & major gifts at Climate Change AI. “Without good answers to questions that extend beyond the environmental impacts to jobs and other AI risks, data centers will continue to face opposition,” she writes.

In Cape Town, officials met repeatedly with a prospective hyperscale investor while basic information about proposed developments, their cumulative electricity demand and the city's wider data-center pipeline 

 as part of the ongoing investigative series The Invisible Hand of Big Tech.

Looking at data centers through a longer history of infrastructure development in India raises familiar questions. How should environmental and social costs be weighed against national objectives? 

, lecturer in human geography and climate at King’s College London, explain how 

 with communities is as important now as ever.

Images flaunting wads of cash, motorcycles, high-end pickup trucks and children wearing armed groups' armbands and posing with rifles. 

, Colombia research assistant at Human Rights Watch, details how Colombian armed groups lure children into their ranks — glamorizing 

. “If Colombia wants to prevent more children from ending up in the mountains with armed groups, social media platform regulation that protects the full spectrum of children’s rights should be at the center of the debate,” he writes.

Age assurance is entering a new phase. As implementation frameworks take shape, New York's approach offers early lessons for policymakers across jurisdictions developing their own 

On the Tech Policy Press podcast, I spoke with Tech Policy Press fellow 

, from cautious "AI literacy" guardrails to New York and LA's one-year moratoriums.

 does not just govern cookie banners. Data protection and privacy expert 

 writes that it limits who can access a device in the first place, and that distinction is now being weakened.

 asked nine privacy and civil liberties experts to score how 

 reshaped rights, oversight, and executive power.

A new report from the UK's Social Platforms Data Access Taskforce concludes there is unlikely to be one mechanism capable of meeting the range of research needs into online harms. 

, UKRI Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, on what 

. “The UK now has the opportunity to consider longer-term infrastructure alongside measures that could strengthen existing research methods, while also learning from approaches under way in the United States and European Union,” she writes.

 across content moderation, AI, competition, and data governance — drawn from daily monitoring of the G20.

Tech Policy Press fellowship applications are open for another week and a half! We're seeking mid-career journalists, researchers, and public policy professionals to explore urgent questions at the intersection of technology and democracy. This year-long, part-time fellowship supports independent reporting and analysis projects on critical topics like AI governance, tech regulation, and digital rights. Since 2023, our program has supported 25 fellows from 11 countries. Could you be part of our next cohort? Apply 

 by September 24, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. EDT.

That’s it for this week’s newsletter. I wish you the best for the week ahead!

Nelson González Sánchez is one of the authors of “‘

I Thought I’d Never See My Mom Again’: Recruitment and Use of Children by Colombian Armed Groups,

” a report published in August by Human Rights Watch.

It was past midnight when my phone buzzed with a “friend suggestion” to look at Facebook.

Facebook had shown me this screen hundreds of times before, usually for an old classmate or a distant relative. This time, the suggestion was far more unsettling.

I recognized the name immediately. “Elenos,” a colloquial term for members of the National Liberation Army (ELN), one of the armed groups that have fought in Colombia for decades and a name long associated with violence in my country. The profile displayed the group’s logo, and had photos and videos of armed men conducting military drills in the mountains.

In the months that followed, Facebook and TikTok recommended dozens of profiles and content posted by these profiles tied to armed groups.

 child recruitment by armed groups in Colombia, a crime that has affected more than 1,500 children in the past five years. I have interviewed hundreds of recruited children, government officials, and others to understand why and how armed groups recruit. Over and over again, I heard the same thing: Armed groups are recruiting children through social media.

I immersed myself in TikTok and Facebook to learn more. Combing through profiles and posts, I found that armed groups use social media to showcase an alluring lifestyle for children and teenagers. Recruitment, in the past associated with coercion in remote rural areas, now often starts in a social media feed, where algorithms amplify and recommend content that glorifies armed groups and steers users, including children, into their grasp.

Screenshots from videos posted to TikTok in July 2026 showing the use of emojis to signal affiliation and explicitly seek new combatants for armed groups. Source: Human Rights Watch

Screenshots from videos posted to TikTok in July 2026 showing the use of emojis to signal affiliation and explicitly seek new combatants for armed groups. Source: 

“We use social media to reach them. That's how I first got in touch with them,” a 17-year-old boy told me. He had been recruited by a dissident group of the demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Catatumbo, on Colombia's border with Venezuela.

As I began interacting with this content, Facebook’s and TikTok’s algorithms flooded my feeds with accounts and posts linked to these groups. Facebook kept promoting profiles linked to armed groups and recommending them to me as friends. And after only five minutes of scrolling through TikTok, I stumbled upon several job offers inviting me to join an armed group. For children in Colombia’s most vulnerable regions, these videos can be deeply seductive.

I reviewed dozens of accounts and posts with images flaunting wads of cash, motorcycles, high-end pickup trucks and children wearing armed groups’ armbands and posing with rifles nearly as tall as they were. The videos were often overlaid with 

—songs that tell stories about cartels, groups’ commanders and drug kingpin lifestyles—and captioned with emojis.

I learned that armed groups rely on emojis as code, in an apparent effort to evade social media companies’ restrictions. A clover emoji refers to coca crops, and combined with cash and cell phone emojis, it can signal a job opportunity in coca cultivation—used to produce cocaine. Because the colors are similar, the Colombian and Armenian flag emojis refer to the FARC; the Angolan one, alongside black and red heart emojis, to the ELN. Nina emojis signal affiliation with armed groups.

Following these emoji signs, I found dozens of posts trying to recruit people. I saw posts that said “There are openings in the ranks“ and “Wanted: people to work for the FARC.” They asked people interested to send a direct message. This explicit recruitment content remained online for months, in some cases accumulating thousands of interactions. Hundreds of accounts commented that they would like to join.

But, as the 17-year-old recruited by FARC dissidents told me, “the reality in the group is very harsh, very different from what they portray on social media.” Children are often transferred to other regions where they are isolated from their family and community, making it difficult to escape. Many are indoctrinated, used in fighting, and abused, sometimes sexually, in the ranks of armed groups.

As part of the investigation, we reported dozens of accounts to Meta (Facebook) and ByteDance (TikTok), and the platforms removed them. Both companies also 

 that their community guidelines and standards ban violent organizations or individuals. However, they are clearly struggling with enforcement. I’ve continued to find accounts posting similar content on both social media platforms.

Armed groups in Colombia have long taken advantage of poverty, social exclusion, domestic violence, and barriers to education to draw children into their ranks. Today, digital platforms have become part of the terrain where armed groups shape aspirations, normalize violence, and identify vulnerable children. Some 

 that almost half of child recruitment in Colombia is driven by social media.

If Colombia wants to prevent more children from ending up in the mountains with armed groups, social media platform regulation that protects the full spectrum of children’s rights should be at the center of the debate. Social media companies should implement stronger measures for the detection and moderation of content linked to armed groups, ensuring that such content is not amplified or recommended by platform algorithms.

When a phone buzzes with a friend request, it shouldn't be an armed group targeting a child in rural Colombia.

This summer, Nvidia, Microsoft, and more than 250 other organizations signed 

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