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PODCAST

The Center Edge

Evan Swarztrauber

Tech policy gets made in the center. The rhetoric lives at the edge. This podcast is about the fights in Washington that shape what gets built, who builds it, and who gets to use it. Host Evan Swarztrauber sits down with the regulators, members of Congress, founders, investors, and advocates shaping the debates on AI, Big Tech, data centers, drones, broadband, satellites, national security, and the fights you haven"t heard about yet.Evan is Principal at CorePoint Strategies, a Senior Fellow at the

technology tech news

All Episodes

44:19

Could Your Data Be Unionized?

The Center Edge ·

2026/10/05

We all do it. You download an app, see pages of legalese, and hit “agree" to the terms of service. You probably didn’t read it. And even if you did, you probably wouldn’t understand it. For better and worse, that action is what makes the digital economy work. Our data pays for the search, email, maps, and social media services we all use, and it's a big reason why America's digital economy represents trillions in market value and millions of jobs. There are downsides, of course—concerns about...

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49:32

Rep. Lori Trahan on Ending AI's Honor System

The Center Edge ·

2026/09/28

Every twist in the AI saga sends reporters and commentators back to the FRONTIER Act. Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) and Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) released the discussion draft of their legislation about two months after Anthropic's "Mythos moment," which kicked off a debate over the cybersecurity risks of advanced AI. The bill itself was introduced just days after OpenAI admitted its models had hacked Hugging Face. Since then, we've had Jacob Coxon's very public resignation from Anthropic, a weeks-...

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56:34

An AI Cartel to Save the World?

The Center Edge ·

2026/09/21

On September 8, Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned. In a viral X post, he said that neither Anthropic nor Open AI were acting responsibly in their race toward self-improving superintelligence and accused them of “gambling with our lives.” Since then, media outlets have been ablaze with reporting and debate. Does AI really have a 10% chance of killing us all? Was Coxon’s post part of a coordinated campaign by AI safetyists to scare the world into slowing down? Do AI companies need an...

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67:50

Open Season on American AI?

The Center Edge ·

2026/08/19

The debate over open source versus closed AI has broken the containment of engineering and policy circles. Wall Street, the Fortune 500, and the U.S. government are all closely following the rise of Chinese open weight AI models and what it means for markets and America's position in the global AI race. Chinese companies have increasingly bet on lower-cost, widely available models, while much of the U.S. frontier ecosystem has remained centered on expensive, proprietary systems from companies...

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48:07

The Mythos Moment: How AI Challenges Cybersecurity

The Center Edge ·

2026/07/29

Recently, OpenAI admitted something unprecedented: its own models hacked another company. During a safety test with guardrails deliberately loosened, its models found a zero-day vulnerability and used it to break out of their sandbox and hack into the production systems of Hugging Face, the main hub for open-source AI. In a way, OpenAI's models passed the test, but only by cheating on it. The models figured out Hugging Face probably had the answer to the test, and they went and took it—...

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46:33

Space Race 2.0: A Satellite Assembly Line

The Center Edge ·

2026/07/23

It seems that every day, there’s a new story about the commercial space industry—from Space X’s IPO to Amazon’s planned $12 billion acquisition of Globalstar. The list of potential services is growing—we’re no longer only talking about incredible feats like connecting billions of people to the Internet, or putting an end to cellular dead zones. We’re talking about data centers in space, satellites that can reflect sunlight onto Earth, and even manufacturing new pharmaceuticals in orbit. We ar...

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57:48

Congress Races the Clock on Kids Safety and AI

The Center Edge ·

2026/07/15

If you follow the politics of AI and kids online safety, the last six weeks have been a firehose. The House passed a bipartisan kids online safety bill for the first time. The White House is negotiating with Sen. Marsha Blackburn on a package pairing kids safety bills with some form of AI preemption—though the scope remains unclear. Sen. Ted Cruz has signaled a Senate Commerce markup that could touch everything from social media design to catastrophic AI risk. And amid it all, the Trump admin...

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60:07

RAMnesia: How AI is Eating the World's Memory

The Center Edge ·

2026/06/24

The cost of memory chips is skyrocketing, and even the biggest companies are feeling it. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told the Wall Street Journal that raising prices on Apple products is now "unavoidable," likening the spike in chip costs to a hundred-year flood unlike anything he'd seen in forty years in the business. And it's not just Apple. If you're in the market for a new laptop, gaming console, or even a car, you may have noticed the sticker price creeping up. High prices have been a st...

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66:14

Is the Open Web on Life Support?

The Center Edge ·

2026/06/15

Recently, at its big annual developer conference, Google announced the most significant overhaul of search in its history. It's rebuilding the search box around AI: conversational queries, an "AI Mode" that answers follow-up questions, and agents that gather information for you in the background.That announcement set off a wave of commentary about the death of the "ten blue links" — the idea that search is no longer a ranked list of websites you click through to, but a conversation with a cha...

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60:51

The Post-Human First Amendment

The Center Edge ·

2026/05/27

In the weeks before his suicide, ChatGPT allegedly told Adam Raine that he "didn't owe" anyone his survival. When shown an image of the noose he planned to use, the chatbot offered him advice on how to make it more effective. And OpenAI’s flagship product even helped Adam hide his plans from his parents. Raine's case is unfortunately one of a growing number involving AI chatbots that have coerced or cajoled vulnerable users—some of them children—toward self-harm. When the families sued, they ...

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48:22

FCC Chair Brendan Carr on Drone Dominance, Wireless...

The Center Edge ·

2026/05/20

President Trump just returned from Beijing, where he and Xi Jinping spent two days hashing out a new phase in U.S.–China great power competition. A lot is up for negotiation, from AI chip sales to soybeans. But while the headlines focus on what each side is willing to give on, the Federal Communications Commission has been taking an aggressive line on national security—on drones, Wi-Fi routers, the foreign labs that test our electronics, and more. If you read the news a lot, you might think t...

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3:58

Introducing The Center Edge

The Center Edge ·

2026/05/20

In this short intro episode, host Evan Swarztrauber lays out what this podcast is and what it isn't. The show is about the technology and telecommunications policy fights that will define the next decade — from AI and antitrust to wireless spectrum, broadband, drones, satellites, and the national security questions that increasingly cut across all of it. The center is where tech policy actually gets made, when bipartisan coalitions can agree on something specific enough to move. The edg...

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12 results

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