Ro Khanna

Ro Khanna (born 1976) has represented California’s 17th district — the literal heart of Silicon Valley, including Apple’s and Nvidia’s headquarters — since 2017. A progressive who wrote the book “Dignity in a Digital Age” (2022), he occupies an unusual position in the AI debate: an ally of both the tech industry and organized labor, trying to make those loyalties compatible.

Innovation with a social contract

In August 2024 Khanna came out against California’s SB 1047, the frontier-model safety bill authored by Scott Wiener, warning it would punish entrepreneurs and small businesses while missing the real risks. He instead champions AI as an engine of his “new economic patriotism” — a moonshot for domestic production that puts factories, chips, and AI jobs in left-behind towns — and in 2025 laid out “seven principles for a democratic AI” along with a call for a new tech social contract to reclaim AI from billionaires.

The nuance is constant and deliberate. Khanna wants AI built in America and adopted broadly, but he pairs every endorsement with demands: protections against mass displacement starting with truck drivers, human pilots kept in cockpits, worker voice in deployment decisions, and antitrust vigilance toward the companies whose valuations his district houses. Critics on the left call it having it both ways; Khanna calls it the only durable path for the technology.