Eric Thompson

Selected writing on technology, policy, and governance

AI & Technology Governance

The AI safety bill

Examines California's SB 1047, the FLOP threshold debate, kill switch requirements, and tradeoffs in regulating frontier AI.

The advance of deepfakes is spurring new countermeasures

Maps the GAN-driven rise of synthetic media, corporate detection arms race, and the case for large-scale verification methods.

Apple's child protection features

Analyzes Apple's on-device CSAM detection, the encryption tradeoffs, and the trust questions raised by client-side scanning.

OpenAI's DALL-E text-to-image model

Explores OpenAI's DALL-E and CLIP releases, their multimodal capabilities, and the implications for bias, labor, and misuse.

California's Prop 22 & Prop 24

Examines California's Prop 22 gig-worker exemption and Prop 24 privacy rights expansion as federal regulation bellwethers.

Geopolitics & National Security

Government surveillance bill

Traces the FISA Section 702 reauthorization fight, "backdoor searches" on US persons, and the warrant requirement debate.

Export controls in US & China

Connects new US, China, and EU export-control regimes covering critical technologies to the rise of digital nationalism.

TikTok's rapid rise to 1.5B installs – and the global reaction

Tracks TikTok's algorithmic ascent, ByteDance's portfolio strategy, and early signs of US-China conflict over data and content.

House TikTok bill

Analyzes the TikTok divestiture bill, its First and Fifth Amendment challenges, and presidential authority over foreign apps.

Israel's Rafah invasion

Explores the debate over Israel's Rafah operation and its implications within the broader context of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Platform Regulation

Meta ends fact-checking

Explores Meta's pivot from 3rd-party fact-checking to Community Notes and peer-reviewed research on platform moderation.

The CA privacy law effective Jan 1 will set the tone for US regulation

Analyzes the CCPA's compliance burden, consumer rights framework, and trajectory toward federal privacy regulation.

Google Chrome & the reinvigoration of browsers around privacy

Tracks Chrome's 3rd-party cookie phase-out, privacy as table stakes in browser competition, and the adtech fallout.

Institutional Governance & Democratic Resilience

The USAID crackdown

Traces the debate around Trump's shutdown of USAID, related legal questions, and the effectiveness of foreign aid.

Birthright citizenship

Examines Trump's executive order against the Fourteenth Amendment, US v. Wong Kim Ark, and executive authority limits.

Biden's Supreme Court reform proposals

Analyzes Biden's three Supreme Court reform proposals and the arguments around their structural and political viability.