Richard von Weizsäcker Lecture

How Tech Firms Shape Geopolitics

The United States has increasingly depended on privately owned technology companies to spur innovation and advance foreign-policy interests. During the 1990s, technology companies commercialized the internet, created the smartphone, built global social-media platforms, and promoted both an open, global internet and American power. During the AI age, the importance of the private sector and its centrality to innovation and defense modernization has only increased. In this talk, Adam Segal discusses how the tech industry has evolved from a relatively detached economic actor into one that wields significant political influence, shaping policy debates and national priorities. This shift, he argues, together with changes wrought by geopolitical competition — above all with China — has meant that the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington has been dramatically remade. What does this mean for US national security and foreign policy interests in the near and the long term?