Former FTC chair, AI antitrust enforcer
Lina Khan
Profile
Lina Khan is the antitrust lawyer who forced Silicon Valley to take regulators seriously again. Appointed FTC Chair by President Biden in June 2021 at age 32 — the youngest chair in the agency’s history — she spent three and a half years dragging US competition policy out of its decades-long consumer-welfare slumber and pointing it squarely at the tech platforms. Her reputation was built years earlier, as a Yale Law student, when she published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in 2017 — a paper that reframed how a generation of lawyers and economists think about platform monopolies. It is not an exaggeration to say that paper restarted a conversation that had been stalled since the 1980s.
For developers building on AI infrastructure, Khan matters because of what she did in her final year at the FTC. In January 2024 she opened a Section 6(b) inquiry into the cloud-and-model partnerships defining the generative AI industry: Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, and Amazon and Alphabet’s deals with Anthropic. The resulting staff report, issued days before she left office in January 2025, laid out in forensic detail the equity stakes, revenue shares, exclusivity clauses, compute commitments, and talent-sharing arrangements buried inside those agreements. Khan’s thesis: hyperscalers were using AI partnerships to lock in the next computing platform before anyone was watching. That inquiry is why Microsoft-OpenAI is now structured as a complicated revenue-share rather than an outright acquisition, and why every subsequent AI deal gets drafted with antitrust lawyers in the room.
She lost big cases too — the Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision merger challenges both failed in court — and the business press rarely missed a chance to say so. But losing hard cases on purpose is the job: she moved the Overton window on what regulators are willing to try. Her other landmark paper, The Separation of Platforms and Commerce (Columbia Law Review, 2019), argued for structural separations — banning dominant platforms from competing with the businesses they host. That idea now echoes in every debate about whether cloud providers should be allowed to build foundation models, or whether frontier labs should be allowed to run their own inference clouds.
Since leaving government in January 2025, Khan returned to Columbia Law School as an associate professor and, as of April 2026, co-directs the new Center for Law and Economy there. She’s also co-chairing the transition team for NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. For anyone building in AI, she’s worth reading not because you’ll agree with everything, but because she articulated — earlier and more clearly than almost anyone — the structural question the industry keeps trying to avoid: who actually owns the stack, and what happens when three companies own all of it.
Key Articles & Papers
Amazon's Antitrust Paradox The Separation of Platforms and Commerce FTC Launches Inquiry into Generative AI Investments and Partnerships FTC Issues Staff Report on AI Partnerships & Investments Study Vision for a Democratic Political EconomyControversies
Khan’s tenure drew constant fire from corporate America and parts of the business press, who argued her enforcement posture was too aggressive and her courtroom record too thin — notable losses included the blocked challenges to Meta’s acquisition of Within and Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision. Defenders counter that bringing hard cases is the point of the job, and that her losses still shifted deal structure industry-wide.
A separate flashpoint: in April 2024, Jon Stewart said publicly that Apple had pressured him not to interview Khan on his Apple TV+ podcast. He eventually hosted her on The Daily Show instead. The episode became a case study in exactly the kind of platform power she was investigating.
Spotify Podcasts
