amac at UMass: How Do We Regulate AI?
9th October 2025
Alex MacGillivray – better known as “amac” – is a lawyer and technologist who was most recently deputy assistant to the president and principal deputy US chief technology officer (CTO) in the Biden-Harris administration. Previously, Macgillivray was deputy US CTO for the Obama-Biden administration, and served as Twitter’s general counsel and board secretary, and as the company’s head of corporate development, communications, and trust and safety. As someone who worked directly on the Biden administration’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and within Twitter in developing core approaches to trust and safety issues, it’s hard to think of anyone more knowledgeable about how technology regulation is built and how corporations respond to it.
Democrats, like all statists, have a built-in reflex: If you see something, it needs to be regulated. This is based on the assumption that the statists will be in charge of the government and therefore in control of such regulation, which they can use for