Vice President Harris delivers a speech on artificial intelligence in London on Nov. 1, 2023.
Daniel Leal/AFP/Via Getty Images
Vice President Harris addressed a packed room at the U.S. embassy in London last fall. She was in town for the Global Summit on AI Safety and was giving a speech the night before the event kicked off. On stage, flanked by American flags, Harris’ sense of gravity was palpable.
“Just as AI has the potential to do profound good, it also has the potential to cause profound harm,” Harris said. Without mincing words, she said the way to deal with that harm was to regulate Big Tech.
“History has shown, in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over the well-being of their customers, the safety of our communities, and the stability of our democracies,” Harris said.
Tech billionaires and Silicon Valley insiders have been lining up to support Harris in her bid for president. She has long ties to the powerful California industry. But this London speech, along with countless others, gives a glimpse into her stance on Big Tech: she won’t necessarily go easy.
Some tech insiders say that during this election, Harris’ stance on tech isn’t the top issue at hand. That’s why the industry is still coalescing around her.
“It’s because they don’t want Donald Trump to be president,” says Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist who’s worked in politics and the tech industry. “I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.”
Tusk says he was a “six-figure donor” to President Joe Biden in 2020 but wasn’t planning to donate in 2024 because he didn’t think it could help Biden win. Now, with Harris as the nominee, he’s pledging six figures again.
1. Harris’ friendly ties to tech
Harris is an Oakland, Calif., native who came up in the backyard of Silicon Valley. She got her start in politics in district attorney offices in the Bay Area, eventually becoming the DA of San Francisco in 2003. She then went on to become the Attorney General of California and then a U.S. Senator for the state, before becoming vice president.
Her campaigns were heavily funded by luminaries in the tech industry. Apple design guru Jony Ive donated, as did Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, hosted a fundraiser for Harris at her Palo Alto home, according to the New York Times.
Harris has also given speeches at tech company headquarters. During one at Google’s campus in 2010, she said she’d been wanting to visit for years. “This is a short drive to come here,” she told the Google crowd. “We’re family.”
Harris’ friends, family and aides also include a cohort of tech industry people. There’s her brother-in-law, Tony West, who’s the head lawyer for Uber. And Sean Parker, a former Facebook executive who invited Harris to his lavish wedding in Big Sur. And a handful of her former aides have moved on to work at tech companies, including Google, Amazon and Airbnb.
2. Tech is pouring cash into the Harris campaign
Since Biden stepped down and endorsed Harris for president, donations have flooded her campaign. Within 36 hours of the announcement, her campaign said it raked in $100 million. Her campaign now says it’s raised $310 million, with two-thirds of that coming from first-time donors.
Silicon Valley insiders are among those throwing support behind Harris.
Sandberg quickly backed Harris again, saying in an Instagram post that she’s “thrilled to support her.” Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, philanthropist Melinda French Gates and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman have also said they’re behind the vice president.
Longtime Silicon Valley staple Ron Conway posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “the tech community must come together to defeat Donald Trump and save our democracy by uniting behind Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Andrew Byrnes, a tech policy strategist and Harris fundraiser, says he raised twice as much money for Harris in the one week after her campaign started than he raised for Biden in a whole year.
“There’s a lot of excitement,” he says. “We consider Kamala ‘one of our own.’”
There are a few notable exceptions among the tech crowd who are backing former president Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance. Elon Musk has endorsed Trump and created a Super PAC to support the candidate. And some conservative tech insiders — including the crypto billionaire Winklevoss twins, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and the investors Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks — say they’re supporting Trump.
3. Venture capital really likes Harris
Venture capital investors have come out in broad support of Harris. A coalition of nearly 650 VCs pledged to vote for her in November and will fundraise on her behalf. The group is called “VCs for Kamala” and says it is pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship and pro-technological progress.
“VCs are not politicians. We’re not organizers,” says Leslie Feinzaig, the group’s organizer and the founder of Graham & Walker Venture Fund. “The fact that so many have come on board, shows you how critical this election is for the tech industry.”
Hoffman and Conway are signatories, as are other well-known tech investors, including Mark Cuban, Vinod Khosla and Chris Sacca.
Tusk, the venture capitalist, also signed the VCs for Kamala pledge and says this election isn’t about which candidate will get the industry more money.
“It’s more that you have to live in a world that feels totally chaotic and filled with hate,” Tusk says. “It’s a world that a lot of people just don’t want to live in. And that’s true whether it’s venture capitalists or lawyers or doctors or construction workers or truck drivers or anyone else.”
Another coalition called Tech4Kamala launched this week with the goal of mobilizing the tech community to support Harris. As of Friday, nearly 1,100 people had signed the group’s open letter and it’s raised more than $25,000 for Harris.
“When we saw the initial support for Trump from a few tech luminaries, we believed that that wasn’t the whole story,” says Julia Collins, a Tech4Kamala co-founder. “When we spoke to developers, designers, founders, freelancers, investors, influencers and many others – the vast majority intended to back VP Harris and almost none favored Trump.”
4. Harris has worked at keeping Big Tech in check
Despite Harris’ ties to tech, she hasn’t necessarily gone easy on the industry over the years. She’s supported laws on digital privacy, online harassment and gig worker protections.
As a senator, she was instrumental during the congressional hearings over Cambridge Analytica — the scandal involving Facebook not telling its tens of millions of users that their personal data had been misappropriated and used for political advertising.
During one hearing, she zeroed in on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and said, “I have to tell you, I’m concerned about how much Facebook values trust and transparency.”
As vice president, and in her role as AI czar for the White House, Harris has tackled artificial intelligence. She’s worked on establishing rules around AI, including creating the United States AI Safety Institute, drafting policy guidance on government use of AI and working on the AI Bill of Rights. Harris has also met with the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft to discuss AI safety.
Still, Harris has never gone as far as to say Big Tech needs to be broken up – something Senator Elizabeth Warren and other progressive politicians have called for. In an interview with the New York Times before the 2020 election, when Harris was asked about breaking up Facebook, Amazon and Google, she said, “My first priority is going to be that we ensure that privacy is something that is intact.”
5. Concerns raised about buying influence
During Biden’s presidency, his appointees at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have filed several lawsuits against Big Tech companies, including Google, Apple and Amazon.
Anti-monopoly and consumer groups have championed FTC chair Lina Khan and her antitrust lawsuits. But tech industry groups have derided her as coming down too hard on business.
Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, donated $7 million to Harris, according to Politico. He then told CNN that Harris should replace Khan as the FTC chair. Billionaire Barry Diller, chair of conglomerate IAC, had the same request.
Hoffman sold LinkedIn to Microsoft in 2016 and now sits on Microsoft’s board, which is under investigation by the FTC. He told CNN this week that he didn’t put conditions on his donation to Harris. Hoffman didn’t return NPR’s requests for comment.
A pro-consumer coalition led by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, PCCC, responded to Hoffman and Diller’s statements by sending a letter to the Harris campaign. They have asked Harris to “make clear” that she stands with Khan. The coalition includes Public Citizen, AFL-CIO, the NAACP and the Tech Oversight Project.
“Lina Khan is a leading light of the Biden-Harris Administration,” says PCCC co-founder Adam Green. “This attack by billionaires is a golden opportunity for Harris to prove her campaign mantra that we will go forward — not backward.”
