Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Lina Khan found herself in cozy company on a two-day trip through Silicon Valley this week to overhaul her reputation as the scourge of Big Tech.
On her first trip to the tech hub home to giants and startups, Khan had an important message for Silicon Valley at talks, dinners and events across the Bay Area: She is a friend to entrepreneurs and founders.
“I think it’s really important for Washington to engage directly with startup founders and get a better sense of the risks that they’re seeing,” Kahn said Friday at startup accelerator Y Combinator.
The high-profile attempt to engage with the tech community marks a shift in Khan’s public relations strategy. In June, she made a similar but lower-profile attempt in New York, where she met with a small group of venture capitalists and spoke about technology industry regulation at a local bookstore.
In San Francisco, surrounded by tech workers and VC investors, Khan reiterated her focus on artificial intelligence, an area her agency was tasked with investigating by President Joe Biden’s executive order this week.
“I think there are very valid concerns right now that the critical inputs to this technology are already controlled by a handful of companies and that there are already bottlenecks that could hinder innovation and competition,” Khan said, pointing out that the The agency is examining everything from graphics processors to cloud computing to the data used by AI models.
At a Mission District cafe where about half of those in attendance raised their hands to identify themselves as employees of Big Tech companies, Khan was greeted with applause and scattered cheers for a fireside chat on Thursday.
Just hours earlier, a man identifying himself as a Meta META employee had said at Stanford University: “I was a big fan of what you did with my boss, even at Meta.” This was an apparent reference to the agency’s lawsuit seeking to block the company’s acquisition of Within Limited, an AI startup.
Big tech companies, particularly Amazon AMZN and Meta, view Khan, who rose to fame after publishing a 2017 academic article in which she called Amazon’s practices anti-competitive, as an obstacle.
Both companies requested that she recuse herself from all antitrust investigations into their practices shortly after she took office, saying in filings at the time that they did not consider her to be impartial.
2023-11-04 00:17:09
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