The potential appointment of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party nominee could put artificial intelligence and big technology companies in the spotlight leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
Harris On AI: Harris, who received President Joe Biden‘s endorsement as the 2024 Democratic nominee Sunday, is on record calling for AI regulation.
The former prosecutor has said she rejects “the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation."
"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," Harris previously said, as reported by TechCrunch.
Harris will likely be less lenient than Biden was in pushing for voluntary standards to regulate the AI sector, Politico reports.
For comparison, Trump has placed low emphasis on AI regulation. He has the support of several notable Silicon Valley donors, including venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who worry that Harris will "overregulate" the AI sector.
Harris on Big Tech: While not a major 2024 election issue, big technology companies and the potential push to break them up could become a new topic if Harris is the Democratic nominee.
Harris — as a Senator, the former attorney general in California and a former district attorney in San Francisco — has a history with the tech sector. Some critics have said Harris didn't do enough while serving as the state's AG to limit the growing influence of big technology companies.
While other Democratic candidates pushed for big technology companies like Amazon.com Inc AMZN, Alphabet Inc GOOGGOOGL and Meta Platforms META to be broken up during the 2020 election, Harris did not.
Harris said the big technology companies should be "regulated in a way that we can ensure the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised."
A potential ban of TikTok in the U.S. has also been a potential election issue. Harris previously said that TikTok shouldn't be banned.
"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 said.
Meanwhile, Trump's new running mate Ohio Senator J.D. Vance has called for the breakup of big technology companies like Alphabet.
"It's time to break Google up. This matters far more than any other election integrity issue. The monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company," Vance tweeted earlier this year.
Vance has targeted Google and Facebook in past comments.
Stances on breaking up big technology companies and pushing for regulation could quickly become an increasing large topic in the 2024 election and potentially at a future presidential debate given the large number of donations coming in from technology leaders on both sides of the political aisle.
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