Lina Khan

Lina Khan (born 1989) became the youngest chair in the history of the Federal Trade Commission in 2021, after her Yale Law Journal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” reframed American competition law for the platform era. When generative AI arrived on her watch, she moved faster against it than any other US regulator.

Putting AI on notice

In a May 2023 New York Times op-ed titled “We Must Regulate A.I. Here’s How,” Khan argued the government could not repeat the laissez-faire mistakes of the Web 2.0 era. That July the FTC opened an investigation into OpenAI, demanding records on whether its data practices and false model outputs harmed consumers. In January 2024 she launched a formal inquiry into the multibillion-dollar partnerships binding Microsoft to OpenAI and Amazon and Google to Anthropic, warning that incumbent cloud giants were positioning themselves to control the AI stack. In September 2024 the agency announced “Operation AI Comply,” a sweep against companies making deceptive AI claims.

Khan was careful to frame her target as concentrated power rather than the technology: she often argued that open, competitive AI markets would serve the public better than a cartel of incumbents. Her aggressive posture made her a bête noire of Silicon Valley donors in the 2024 election, and she departed the FTC in early 2025 when the incoming administration replaced her. Her staff-level AI competition reports were later removed from the agency’s public materials.