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In our current political and media environment the loudest voices are the ones that are farthest from the center. Tech hasnt been spared, with some Silicon Valley leaders drifting rightnot only out of ideology, but also pragmatism. Box CEO Aaron Levie sits somewhere in the middle: not a MAGA-touting accelerationist like Marc Andreessen, nor a traditional progressive like Reid Hoffman. But he is clear-eyed about one thing: Donald Trump will likely preside over some of the most pivotal years in AI and innovation. And Levie sees reason for optimism. Fast Company spoke to him about AI policy, AI and crypto czar David Sacks, Elon Musks DOGE, and AI safety concerns. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. I know you came out in support of Harris before the election, but now I’d like to find out what your assessment of Trump is so far, where technology is concerned. During the Harris campaign, I felt like there was an opportunity, and there really needed to be a very strong kind of pro-technology, progress-type of push in the Democratic party. So I was trying to ensure that they saw key policy issues around AI and deregulation and how to drive more growth. And so that was my interest in the topic during the campaign cycle. But I just want America to succeed, and I want our tech position to be as strong as possible. And I think there’s a number of topics that kind of relate to that. There’s high-skill immigration, there’s AI policy, there are regulatory issues and topics that face the tech industry, especially more of the harder tech, more manufacturing-leaning parts of tech. And I think we have an opportunity as a country to ensure that we are building for not just the next couple of years, but the next couple of decades, and there’s a lot of key things that are going to happen right now around AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, advanced manufacturing, new forms of energy; all of these things will intersect with either federal or state and local policy, and it’s critical to make sure that we’re heading in the right direction on those topics. As it relates to Trump, I think there have been a number of things that have been signaled that I think are actually extremely positive to those topics. I think we’re really early in seeing how they will manifest. Some of them were on the campaign trail, some of them are kind of being in office, that have been signaled, and to some extent, a little bit in a wait-and-see mode on how they all manifest and evolve. And you know, my views on them are extremely clear, and I’m hoping we lean in the right direction on a large number of those topics. Lets talk about AI first. I think you saw JD Vance give his Paris speech, and he did talk a bit about striking a balance between regulation and innovation, but he also seemed to scold Europe for what it has done with the AI Act. He accuses them of going too far. Do you agree with him on that? My rhetoric would probably be different, but I am worried that when it comes to policy conversations, in the U.S. and even globally, we have tilted more toward the precautionary views of AI as opposed to the productive and pro-progress-oriented views of AI. I thought that it was compelling that the vice president talked about how AI is going to actually createI’m going to now probably change some of the wordsbut create more of an abundance environment where we can actually use it to help jobs and create jobs, and we can use it to improve healthcare, and we can use it to drive manufacturing. And if you just take a word content in the speech and compare it to maybe a speech that would have come from a U.S. politician a year or two ago, it leaned 80% more positive than negative, with the appropriate levels of calling out that there are things that we do need to pay attention to. Do you have thoughts about David Sacks and his appointment to “AI and Crypto Tsar”? I am much closer to the AI side and the AI Tsar. I don’t think about crypto that much. David’s a strong choice for that. David knows his way around Silicon Valley. He knows all the people doing all the important work at the leadership levels of AI labs and big tech. And so to have a conduit that can help marry what’s happening in Silicon Valley with the policy decisions happening in the government, I think he’s in a great position. I’m also very happy about Michael Katzios on OSTP (Trump nominated Kratsios as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy). I think he’s a very strong pick for that job. And so I think the administration has brought in sophisticated, thoughtful technologists or business leaders into the administration to help drive policy in the right direction. You were also upbeat about Elon Musk and what he’s doing with DOGE, at least around the time of the election. Do you have any thoughts about that now? At a philosophical level, I think that the thing I get more excited about in the DOGE remit is how do we modernize the approach that many of these agencies are taking to regulation? How do we ensure that we’re driving more efficiency so we can have just better productivity in the government? I think that’s a very good thing. I think there’s an ability to modernize a lot of the technology as well in the government to get more efficiency and be able to drive just overall better results. When you have better data feeds coming in, when you have better ways of collaborating, when you get better insights, we can make better policy decisions, we can run the government better. As a big-name tech CEO, do you feel an obligation to express your views and let people know where you stand on these things? For me, it’s a natural thing. But I do think we’re in an era right now where there’s almost no industry, and especially in tech, there’s no subindustry in tech that will not be impacted by policy decisions from the federal government. And so I do think we’re in an environment where you have to lean in to some extent on the policy conversation if you want any chance that it ends up going in a productive direction. I have some things that to me personally, from a business perspective, rise to higher or lower levelslike one of my biggest areas is high-skill immigration. And so thats an area that I unequivocally and emphatically view as mission-critical to get right because it will lead to the next generation of companies for us to go build in the futurethe next Apple, the next Google, the next OpenAI. You want the odds to be that that’s going to get created in America, and high-skill immigration is one of your ways of increasing those odds. AI policy raises very high because getting AI policy right or wrong could mean that either the U.S. is the home of AI or China is the home of AI. And as a U.S. company, I think it would be a disaster if we miss the window where we could have complete AI leadership. On the high-skilled labor part of this, are there specific changes to that that you are in favor of or that you think might have a chance of happening in the next four years? We do need a fster way for people to get into the country that is more of a merit-oriented approach. On the campaign trail, Trump very clearly stated that he wants to stamp a green card to every diploma for individuals that are coming from outside the country to study here. And so I think there’s been some acknowledgment that we have an inefficient system. It’s a little bit too random at times, and it’s probably not serving us in the best way possible of getting just clearly getting the best talent in the world to always come here, and that’s what we need. I will keep fighting and shouting from the rooftops that that’s a critical policy, whether it’s in the Trump administration or whatever administration comes next. I know that your business depends on AI, and you’re probably looking down the road and thinking about how Boxs product can evolve as AI progresses. Do you have concerns about the safety risks of future AI models? The labs need to operate responsibly. They need to test these models and ensure the safety and protection of how these models operate and ensure that we are in a situation where AI can’t go rogue and complete actions on their own without the right kind of guardrails being built into these systems. So, I’m in favor of everything that the market is currently doing. The part that I’m less in favor of is a situation where there would be just an incredibly extreme liability for the model providers to be able to release new AI model updates without major government involvement. Because what that will do is dramatically slow down the pace of the industry, and the pace of the industry will move at the rate at which the government can evaluate and understand how AI works. And we see in any industry where that is happening, we see less competition, we see higher prices, we see less innovation. Maybe there’s a time and a place for that to happen in AI, but we’re not there yet. AI right now is really early. And so, what we need is an environment where the AI innovation is accelerating, where the models are getting better, where they’re getting cheaper, where they’re getting more capable. And what we need is a shared industry-oriented way of establishing that we do need safe AI. These teams should be testing their models. We should have more best practices, more research, more red teaming of these technologies. But to me, I have not been compelled yet that we need the government to overwhelm the system with those reviews and those procedures. And I may get to that point where I do believe that, and I’m actually glad that there are lots of people that say we need that. I think it should be a really healthy debate and dialogue.
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E-Commerce
When the Eaton Fire burned through Altadena in January, Patricia Lopez-Gutierrez and her children had to flee from the house theyd been renting for a decade. Lopez-Gutierrez also lost work: Shes a housecleaner, and her clients lost their own homes in the fire. “I’ve been here for 18 years, and I really don’t want to leave this area,” she said through a translator. “My children and their schools are here. I’m trying to get more work so I don’t have to leave.” As she struggles to pay her billsincluding at her rental house, which ended up surviving the fire but was so heavily damaged by smoke that she’s desperate to find a new place to liveshe turned to St. Vincent de Paul, one of several local organizations providing direct assistance to fire victims. The nonprofit paid a utility bill for her in January, and then a car payment and dental bill this month. It was enough, for now, to make it possible for her to keep paying rent. The fire destroyed thousands of homes in Altadena, one of the more affordable corners of L.A. County. St. Vincent de Paul, working with a team of 18 volunteers, has helped around 150 families so far, prioritizing families with children and renters who lost their homes. In many casesparticularly for Hispanic residents who worked as housecleaners or gardenersresidents also lost their jobs. Others have minimum-wage jobs that make it difficult to afford to rent a new house or apartment. While St. Vincent de Paul covers bills directly (paying rent to a landlord, for example, or paying a doctor’s office), many other organizations are simply giving residents cash directly. Pasadena Community Foundation, a local foundation, has given grants through a wildfire fund to help support dozens of organizations doing that work. The Dena Care Collective, a new organization launched by End Poverty in California (EPIC) and FORWARD, has raised more than $1 million to help support families and businesses in the immediate aftermath of the fire with direct cash payments. “There is significant empirical data that highlights the efficacy of direct cash payments to families,” says Aja Brown, the former mayor of the city of Compton, who grew up in Altadena and is helping lead the Dena Care Collective along with former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs. “There’s also a wealth of data that substantiates [the fact that] bureaucracy and governmental systems are slow to react. And quite frankly, they aren’t designed for emergency relief. Getting cash in the hands of families is the most impactful and the most efficient way to help families; they innately understand what’s best for [their] aid and the relief based on their current conditions.” Cash is a critical tool for people living in poverty in ordinary times; in Stockton, a study of a program that gave a series of no-strings-attached checks to low-income residents found that people who got the payments were more likely to go from unemployment to full-time employment and take other steps for their future, like moving to a better apartment or fixing their car. In a disaster, quick access to cash is even more important to help people stay afloat. “In a disaster like this, of course people need cash, because water bottles aren’t wealth,” says Tubbs. “Clothing isn’t cash. People need money to be able to rebuild, to be able to move, to be able to persist.” GiveDirectly, an organization founded on the premise that sending money to the world’s poorest households can help them begin to overcome poverty, has raised more than $2 million for low-income households impacted by the L.A.-area fires. While getting some money from FEMA can sometimes take a month or two, the nonprofit is able to act more quickly. (FEMA gave eligible residents $770 to help cover immediate needs after the disaster, but getting any additional support took longerand $770 doesn’t go far in a city like L.A. Immigrants who don’t have legal status also can’t get help from FEMA.) Two weeks after the fires, the organization sent notifications to residents via a food stamp app inviting them to enroll for the cash payments, a process that takes roughly a minute. On average, the payments arrived three days later. The organization is giving transfers of $3,500, enough to cover two weeks at a lower-end Airbnb in the L.A. area, a month of food for a family of four, and a month of healthcare and transportation. Of course, the support is only a small and temporary part of the solution. As rents have steeply risen in and around L.A.something that was happening earlier and then exacerbated by the disasterpeople who were displaced are struggling to find places to live. Some renters are now doubled or tripled up with friends in tiny apartments. Homeowners who bought homes decades ago in Altadenaor inherited mortgage-free homes from parents or grandparents who paid little for themare often now finding that their insurance won’t cover the cost of rebuilding. Others lost coverage as insurers have dropped policies in areas at risk of fires. Even those who still have housing, like Lopez-Gutierrez, are dealing with new challenges. In her case, her landlord wants to raise her rent, even though he hasn’t repaired damage from the fire (and despite the fact that price gouging is illegal). She’s trying to find a new rental, but her low credit score is making that difficult. Even if bills are covered for a month or two, many families still don’t know what will come nextespecially since the rebuilding process will be slow. Before the fires, when St. Vincent de Paul helped pay unexpected bills for residents, the situation was different. “It’s the housecleaner whose son or daughter had to go to the emergency room and there was a $1,000 bill and they can’t afford rent,” says Dave de Csepel, an investor who helps lead the volunteer work at St. Vincent de Paul. “So we come in, pay that rent, and life goes onwe bridge them to get to the next month.” Now, he says, “This is a tidal wave that has hit this community. This is the beginning. It’s hard to see how all these families come out of this. We love the diversity of our community and we want to have folks stay in the area. But it’s hard to keep everyone together, and I’m afraid that there are a lot of hard times ahead for these families.”
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E-Commerce
As protests against the Trump administration and in favor of Palestine continue to grow across the country, the U.S. State Department is reportedly planning to use tech to try and tamp down on dissent. This month, Axios reported that Marco Rubios “Catch and Revoke” plan to strip foreign nationals of the visas that allow them to remain in the country could be powered by AI analysis of their social media accounts. The mooted use of AI comes as former Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Khalil has become the face of the Trump administrations tougher line on protest, with Khalil currently detained and threatened with the revocation of his green card for his participation on on-campus protests. Using AI to try and analyze the contents of peoples social media posts for actions that the Trump administrationif notably not the law and rights set out under the countrys constitutional amendmentsdeems unacceptable is a risky move that runs the risk of creating huge false positives. And it worries privacy and AI experts in equal measure. For so many years, we have heard this very bad argument that we dont need to worry because we have democracy, says Carissa Véliz, an AI ethicist at the University of Oxford. Precisely the point of privacy is to keep democracy. When you dont have privacy, the abuse of power is too tempting, and its just a matter of time for it to be abused. The risk Véliz and others worry about is that digital privacy is being eroded in favor of a witch hunt driven by a technology that people often have more faith in its accuracy than is truly deserved. Thats a concern too for Joanna Bryson, professor of ethics and technology at Hertie School in Berlin, Germany. Disappearing political enemies, or indeed just random citizens, has been a means of repression for a long time, especially in the new world, she says. I dont need to point out the irony of Trump choosing a mechanism so similar to the South and Central American dictators in the countries he denigrates. Bryson also points out that there parallels with how Israel used AI to identify tens of thousands of Hamas targets, many of whom were then targeted for physical bombing attacks in Gaza by the Israeli military. The controversial program, nicknamed Lavender, has been questioned as a military use of AI that could throw up false positives and is unvetted. Unless the AI systems are transparent and audited, we have no way of knowing whether theres any justification for which 35,000 people were targeted, says Bryson. Without appropriate regulation and enforcement of AI and digital systemsincluding military ones, which incidentally even the EU is not presently doingwe cant tell whether there was any justification for the targets, or if they just chose enough people that any particular building they wanted to get rid of theyd have some justification for blowing it up. The use of AI is also something of a smokescreen, designed to deflect responsibility for serious decisions that those having to make them can claim are guided by supposedly “impartial” algorithms. This is the kind of thing Musk is trying to do now with DOGE, and already did with Twitter, says Bryson. Eliminating humans and reducing accountability. Well, obscuring accountability. And the problem is that when looking at AI classifications of social media content, accountability is important because its a case of when, not if, the technology misfires. The risks of hallucination and bias are big problems within AI systems. Hallucinations occur when AI systems make up answers to questions, or invents what could be seen as damning posts for users if their social media content is being parsed through artificial intelligence. Inherent bias in systems because of the way theyre designed, and by whom theyre created, is also a big factor in many errors in AI systems. In 2018, Amazon was forced to withdraw plans to perform a first pass at job applicants résumés because the system was found to be automatically rejecting all female candidates because of ways in which the AI had been set up and trained. Its bad enough for those errors to impact on whether or not someone gets invited to a job interview. But when it comes to potentially being detained and deported from the United Statesand risking not being allowed back into the country in the futureits a much more high-stakes situation.
Category:
E-Commerce
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