Big Tech's Foreign Policy Takeover

This post is part of a series of contributor perspectives and analyses called "The Coming Age of Tech Trillionaires and the Challenge to Democracy." Learn more about the call for contributions here, and read other pieces in the series as they are published here.

On a mild Friday morning in March, Elon Musk exited a black Escalade and strode into the Pentagon, where United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth welcomed him. Video posted on Hegseth’s X account showed the pair in the secretary’s office smiling and laughing with other officials — a demonstratively informal conversation. Standing beside President Trump in the Oval Office later that day, Hegseth stridently denied a New York Times report, confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, that the original purpose of the visit had been to fulfill Musk’s request to receive a top-secret briefing on military plans related to China, where the billionaire has significant business interests.

As an advisor to Trump, Musk has been a major force in US foreign policy. His DOGE Service dismantled USAID and urged cuts to the State and Defense Departments, moves that are radically altering America’s global footprint. Even though Musk is reportedly planning to scale back his time in Washington, the influence he wields through his financial support for Republican politicians and the interests that span his business empire will remain. For instance, America’s geopolitical ambitions in space depend on SpaceX, as do other critical capabilities. In 2022, Musk threatened to shut off vital Starlink service to the Ukrainian military — which apparently came after a conversation with Vladimir Putin, with whom he reportedly regularly speaks — prompting Pentagon officials to scramble to negotiate a deal to keep the service on.

Musk is only the most brazen illustration of how a handful of commercial tech firms are co-opting US foreign policy. Several big US tech companies have become global players on par with nation-states. Though lacking hard military power, they control critical technologies and digital infrastructure — “bottlenecks of knowledge, connection, and desire” — that underpin the world economy, shape the lives of billions, and increasingly confer geopolitical power. Tech leaders like Musk, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and others have status equal to or beyond most heads of state and government. Dozens of countries now have diplomatic missions in Silicon Valley.

The tech leaders’ recent genuflecting to President Trump obscures their leverage. Their importance to American power will only grow as competition with China increases, the AI arms race escalates, and the capacity of US foreign affairs agencies dwindles. From the United Fruit Company to ExxonMobil, corporations have long had a significant influence on US foreign policy. But perhaps not since the days of the East India Company has a global superpower been so reliant on private entities.

This privatization creates strategic vulnerabilities and weakens democratic accountability. The tech companies are, by nature, dedicated to profit and private ambitions, not the security and welfare of the American public. It should concern us when a private individual controls a vital battlefield communications network or sides with autocracies to manipulate information flows, or might build an AI system that avails its owner of god-like powers.

Restoring the balance of public and private power would require state investment and regulation that, absent a major shift in the US political economy, is unthinkable. Yet even in this political climate, the state and coalitions of other actors must take steps to supervise the companies’ global activity and get a better handle on the critical technologies on which America’s global interests depend — especially AI.

In 1997, the high-water mark of US post-Cold War hegemony, Jessica T. Mathews noted in a Foreign Affairs essay that the nature of global power was changing. Due primarily to globalization, non-state actors — NGOs, multinational corporations, universities, and international organizations — were coming to wield ever greater influence over international economic, political, social, and security affairs. States were still predominant, but a “power shift” was underway.

That same year, the Clinton Administration issued its policy for governing the expansion of the internet, which then had only 70 million users, a mere 2 percent of the world’s population. The “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” stipulated that the government would step aside and allow the private sector to lead the net’s global expansion without regulatory constraint on the digital economy. A boom ensued, driven by American companies that grew as they expanded into digital markets around the world.

By the late 2000s—with populations worldwide using Google, YouTube, and Facebook—the companies found themselves grappling with international issues that went beyond digital commerce. For the most part, they adopted foreign policies consistent with US interests and values. During the Arab Spring, the companies, often coordinating with the US State Department, deployed tools to help pro-democracy demonstrators organize and communicate in the face of regime repression. In 2010, when Google withdrew from China because of government censorship demands and attempts to access accounts of human rights activists, co-founder Sergey Brin said, “Perhaps people don’t believe us, but our focus has really been what’s best for the Chinese people, it’s not been about our particular revenue or profit or whatnot.”

With the companies cast as a global force for economic development, human rights, and democratization, an NPR journalist mused whether we were entering a world where “we take the nation-building out of the hands of the commander-in-chief” and it becomes “part of the employee handbook at Google.” That seemed all the more plausible as the failures of Afghanistan and Iraq laid bare the limits and hypocrisy of US power. America began withdrawing from the world, with the State Department and other civilian foreign affairs agencies leading the retreat, suffering budget cuts, staffing reductions, and an institutional lethargy that posed a stark contrast to the innovative, dynamic Silicon Valley firms.

But as they expanded — by 2016 Google, YouTube, and Facebook were all in more than 180 countries — the firms’ business practices and thirst for growth and market access often undermined US interests. Compliance with authoritarian demands to censor dissidents and amplify state propaganda increased. Facebook was used to attack elections in Western democracies and spread violence in Myanmar. Google quietly sought to access the Chinese market, including a project to develop a censored search engine that was abandoned in 2019 after its existence was leaked. A whistleblower recently alleged that Meta secretly built censorship tools and shared data with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to the detriment of US national security.

More and more, the companies’ high-minded global missions yielded to capitalist imperatives. The tech firms were corporations. And like any other corporation, when push came to shove, they would choose their own interests and profit over national interests or a public set of values. US foreign policy is developed by public servants who, in theory at least, represent the collective interest. Crucially, those officials are accountable to the public. Elections and various institutional oversight mechanisms constrain them. No such checks limit tech leaders like Musk or Zuckerberg, who have near-absolute control over their firms.

The larger issue now is that the tech companies control, in ever-increasing proportion, technologies and infrastructure that are vital to US power in the world. Subsea cables, cloud computing, LEO satellites, data flows, advanced semiconductors — these are no longer merely sources of economic strength but are also vectors of geopolitical competition. We have caught glimpses of the vulnerabilities this creates for US foreign policy, as when Musk has dangled Starlink access over Ukraine or Taiwan, or when Nvidia circumvented US AI chip export controls by developing slightly less powerful versions tailor-made for the Chinese market.

The twin dynamics of a dramatic reduction in state foreign affairs capacity under the Trump Administration and the development of advanced AI stand to raise the stakes. Following the elimination of USAID, the State Department faces a sweeping reorganization, and potentially crippling budget cuts. We can expect the vacuum will mean a bigger, more autonomous role for the tech firms in international diplomacy, global tech policy, and even foreign development. Other countries will increasingly treat the tech firms as appendages of the state.

Many consider AI to be as critical to the global balance of power as atomic weapons or industrialization. Systems that exceed human intelligence in cognitive tasks could confer immense and decisive advantages — military capabilities, economic efficiencies, and rapid accelerations in science and technology R&D. Misguided or not, bipartisan consensus has emerged that this is an arms race, driven by fear of what could happen if an autocracy like China builds such a system first.

Yet there should also be concern about what it could mean if AI is solely in the hands of an unaccountable private actor. Unlike atomic weapons or any other transformational geostrategic technology, AI is being developed without the involvement or even clear visibility of the US government. Some of the leading labs are private firms controlled by single individuals, lacking even the limited openness required of a public corporation.

On day one, Trump scuttled the Biden administration’s non-binding mandate that AI companies share model safety test data. But Trump’s vow to “unleash” the AI companies in order for the US to “dominate the future like never before” was more a change in tone than policy. Channeling Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, President Biden warned about the dangers of an overly-powerful “techno-industrial complex.” The dissonance seemed to escape him when minutes later he emphasized that the US had to win the AI race against China — a goal that currently depends entirely on that complex.

What can be done? The ultimate, necessary solution is a more robust state. This would take massive public investment and institutional reform, both to bolster the capacity, effectiveness, and technological expertise of the State Department and other foreign affairs agencies, as well as to revive federal science and technology research and development. Bold technological projects like the Manhattan Project, ARPANET, and the Space Program were only possible because of high federal research and development spending, assertive government coordination, and the ability to attract top talent.

Such a revival seems impossible in the near term, as the Trump Administration aggressively hollows out the foreign affairs agencies and federal science and technology apparatus. Nor would it be desirable to return to the 20th-century era of centralized government power over foreign affairs. As Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote in 2009, the US, owing to its dynamic, open society, has been the largest beneficiary of the power shift Mathews described. In an increasingly complex world, US companies, NGOs, and numerous other actors have capabilities and networks that the government does not. To overly constrain that ecosystem or to stifle innovation would be self-defeating.

Ideally, the US government should play the role of coordinator and monitor, working more closely with the companies and exercising greater oversight over their global activities. This would start with a recognition that many of the products of several commercial technology firms are critical infrastructure vital to US interests and national security. Like telecommunications, energy utilities, banks, and defense industries, much of the tech sector should operate under both corporate governance and a public regulatory framework.

As it has done in these sectors and others, Congress or the executive branch should establish oversight boards with teeth and technical expertise to mitigate risks and conflicts of national and private interest. Such oversight is especially urgent for AI safety, and the government should play a more direct supervisory role over both the integration of AI systems in existing critical infrastructure, as well as frontier AI development by monitoring compute.

In the absence of government action, which might depend on a change of administration, coalitions of other actors should step in. One might imagine a Foreign Policy Tech Oversight Council, with high-level think tank experts, retired diplomats, and international relations scholars that could issue public assessments, transparency scorecards, and early warnings regarding how private tech companies’ activities are affecting democratic foreign policy objectives. A similar body of critical infrastructure and security experts could assess national security dependencies on private tech infrastructure and monitor risks that arise from AI use in critical infrastructure. Initiatives like these and others would not be replacements for government entities, but they could create awareness among the public, government officials, and employees within the companies themselves.

As a society, we need to understand and scrutinize the big tech firms not simply as companies whose products we use and whose business models are studied in business schools, but as foreign policy actors. The companies are unique in their power and reach, and they are not all alike. The public needs a clearer understanding of their various governance models, just as we study the political systems of different nation-states.

If an instructional analogue exists, it is the European company-states of the colonial era. American big tech firms lack the armies and territory of the East India Company, which at one point ruled over the entire Indian subcontinent. Still, their digital empires are vaster and more indispensable to modern life. Britons in the 18th century could have made do without tea. Shut off the servers of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, and civilization as we currently know it would quickly collapse.

Though the East India Company enhanced Britain’s global power and wealth, the primacy of unaccountable private interests weakened the nation’s moral standing, corrupted its domestic politics, and cemented a style of colonial imperialism that caused some of the worst horrors of the 19th and 20th centuries — to say nothing of the millions in Asia and Africa who directly suffered and died under Company subjugation.

Clearly, the analogy is imperfect. Meta does not commit massacres. To the contrary, the companies are full of thoughtful, careful people, many of whom are committed to doing good and improving humanity's condition. The issue is not a lack of good intentions. Rather, it is the yawning divide between public and private power—the imbalance at the heart of so many of the ills in American political, economic, and social life today.