What Kamala Harris has said about AI, tech regulation and more

With President Joe Biden dropping out of the race, Vice President Kamala Harris may become the Democrats’ new nominee.

In announcing his plans, Biden offered his “full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” while Harris said her “intention is to win and earn this nomination.” That said, it’s not clear whether other Democratic politicians will challenge her for the nomination at an open convention, or through some other selection process.

If Harris is selected, the Democrats will have a presidential nominee with roots in the Bay Area — she was born in Oakland — and a long relationship with the tech industry. (Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance is also deeply connected to Silicon Valley.) She was San Francisco’s district attorney, then California’s attorney general, before being elected to the Senate in 2016.

VCs like John Doerr and Ron Conway were among her early supporters, and as a presidential candidate, she was quickly endorsed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Other industry figures, including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, have been more circumspect or called for an open convention.

Some of the industry’s critics have complained that she didn’t do enough as attorney general to curb the power of tech giants as they grew.

At the same time, she has been willing to criticize tech CEOs and call for more regulation. As a senator, she pressed the big social networks over misinformation. During the 2020 presidential campaign, when rival Elizabeth Warren was calling for the breakup of big tech, Harris was asked whether companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook should be broken up. She instead said they should be “regulated in a way that we can ensure the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised.”

As vice president, Harris has also spoken about the potential for regulating AI, saying that she and President Biden “reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation.”

Biden had issued an executive order calling for companies to set new standards around the development of AI, and Harris said these “voluntary commitments are an initial step toward a safer AI future with more to come, because, as history has shown, in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over the wellbeing of their customers, the safety of our communities, and the stability of our democracies.”

Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz recently pointed to concerns that the Biden administration will “overregulate” AI as one of their reasons for supporting Donald Trump.

On another hot-button issue, a recent bill that would ban TikTok if its parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell it, Harris said, “We need to deal with the owner, and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok.”

Harris has been less vocal on the issues around cryptocurrency, though she would presumably support the Biden administration’s crypto regulations.