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It’s difficult to imagine human beings less similar in temperament than Donald Trump and most of the executives who run big tech companies. But the tech industry, like any business, is transactional by definition, and Trump might be the most nakedly transactional public figure of the century. In the president’s second term, that shared trait has given us too many weird and discomforting moments to count, from Apple, Google, and Microsoft funding the new White House ballroom to the U.S. government taking a 9.9% stake in Intel.
In both January 2025 and January 2026, I wrote newsletters arguing that the executives contorting themselves to be the president’s buddy were merely postponing the day when they’d have to confront some controversy too consequential to ignore. Since then, Trump has dialed his racism, corruption, and generally strange behavior way past 11, and no great reckoning has come. So I’m not going to predict that Tuesday’s history-making midterm election results will spark radical change in the tech industry’s desire to butter up to the president, whose term is not yet half over.
Still, the Democrats’ decisive reclamation of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives has gigantic implications for how the industry looks after its interests in Washington. Republicans have been so steadfast in their support of the president that in some ways engaging with the federal government really has boiled down to engaging with Trump. That mostly requires flattering him or otherwise doing things he believes make him look good. The process often makes executives look ridiculous, but the payback is so potent they’ve been willing to bear that burden.
Democrats won’t be as easy to charm. The party’s leaders are already publicly giddy over the opportunity to subpoena tech CEOs on matters such as AI policy, children’s online safety, and chip exports to China. Even before the election, The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Glazer, Georgia Wells, and Hannah Critchfield reported that companies such as Meta and Google were pushing back—quietly—against the Department of Homeland Security’s demands for sensitive user data. In part, they were anticipating having to defend any handover before newly powerful Democrats.
AI is shaping up as the most fraught of these areas. Polls show that a plurality of Americans believe AI does more harm than good. According to a CNBC poll, 56% of voters said data centers were “a crucial or major factor” in their decisions on November 3. With Democrats even warier of the technology than Republicans, the new Congress is incentivized to take an activist role in shaping its future.
One American who is wildly enthusiastic about AI, and averse to anything but a light regulatory touch, is Donald Trump. Even more than many AI CEOs, he has advocated for the industry regulating itself rather than relying on government intervention. His hands-off approach has been one of the biggest gifts the industry has gotten out of its gingerly positive interactions with him.
Yet Trump, who appears to be in thrall to AI slop but reportedly doesn’t use a PC or even have an email account, has always been the strangest of allies in the quest to spread AI through every aspect of life. In August, he asserted that communities that failed to welcome data centers would end up “backwards and poor.” Oddly enough, being berated by the president didn’t lead voters to embrace AI infrastructure in their own backyards. Instead, they opposed it in 40 ballot measures in 10 states.
Trump’s attitude toward AI—exuberant but wholly uninformed by expertise—has already stress-tested the industry’s willingness to suck up to him. His conclusion that the technology suffers from a branding problem led him to decree that it should be renamed “super intelligence,” or SI. No actual technologist would have come up with that on their own, in part because they use the term superintelligence to mean something else. Yet no company that aspires to be a government contractor is going to openly scoff at Trump’s demand.
That dynamic has led to companies seeing if they can get away with small acts of performative compliance rather than wholesale adoption. For instance, IBM used the super intelligence term in a press release on its quarterly earnings, but reverted to “AI” in the release’s boilerplate text. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted that its AIForce platform is now officially known as SIForce; almost a month later, the company hasn’t bothered to change the name on its site. Even Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI, which did change its name to SpaceX Super Intelligence, still calls the technology it makes AI, not SI.
I would not be shocked if this approach—continuing to humor Trump, but only to the extent absolutely necessary—grows increasingly common among tech leaders. Whether they’re sparring with Democrats or finding common ground with them, it will require vast amounts of time and mental energy. And the results could have a far greater impact on their long-term prospects than their relationship with an increasingly erratic lame-duck president.
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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