Lina Khan

persona · active · confidence: medium-high · reviewed 2026-09-21 · tier: quarterly

Who she is

Affiliation (role check run 2026-09-21 — three hats v1 did not have): Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School (joined 2020) and, since 2026-04-02, Director of Columbia's new Center for Law and the Economy (co-director Lev Menand; funded by the Ford Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation, Omidyar Network, Hewlett Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Knight Foundation Federal Alumni Fellowship Fund). Since 2026-07-22, Chair of the Board of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani to lead the 27-member board, succeeding Margaret Anadu; press reports describe the post as unpaid (not confirmed on a fetched primary). Co-chair of Mamdani's mayoral transition, named 2025-11-05 ("focused on getting set up to assist the transition on economic policy and personnel," per her spokesperson). Ex-Chair, Federal Trade Commission, 2021-06-15 to 2025-01-20; stayed on as a commissioner until 2025-01-31. She was not fired — Trump designated Andrew Ferguson chair on inauguration day and she told staff by memo on 2025-01-20 that she "will resign from the commission in the coming weeks" (v1's "fired" is graded Wrong below). Author of "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" (Yale Law Journal, 2017). Born 1989-03-03. Runs a Substack ("Served as 57th Chair of the Federal Trade Commission," 17,000+ subscribers) that is mostly an archive of her podcast appearances.

One-line position: AI is being built on top of markets that were already monopolized, by the same firms, through partnerships and investments that deliver control without a merger review — and the law already reaches all of it. Her signature sentence has not moved in three years: "there is no exemption from the [antitrust] laws on the books" (Stanford, 2023-11-02) became "there's no AI exemption from laws already on the books" (X, 2026-09-13). What has moved is the target: in 2023 it was cloud and chips; in 2026 it is also the AI companies' own products — enforcers "already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products."

Discipline & technical bet

Antitrust lawyer and legal scholar of the neo-Brandeisian school (named for Justice Louis Brandeis, who thought bigness itself was the danger — structure over consumer prices). She is not a technologist and makes no technical bet of her own; her wager is structural. She reads the AI industry as a "stack" (chips → cloud → models → apps) with bottleneck layers where incumbents can decide who enters: Nvidia at chips ("various ways that they had become a core gatekeeper," Krugman conversation recorded 2026-07-14), the three hyperscalers at cloud, and the cloud-provider–lab partnerships (Microsoft–OpenAI, Amazon–Anthropic, Google–Anthropic) tying models to clouds. Her 2025 twist, from the DeepSeek shock: frontier capability does not require hyperscaler-scale capital, so the "only giants can do this, protect them" argument is false — competition, not national-champion protection, keeps the US ahead (NYT op-ed, 2025-02-04). Her 2026 twist: an agent that breaks out of its sandbox and hacks a third party (OpenAI–Hugging Face, July 2026) is a defective product, and product-liability and unfair-practices law — she cites FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro. (1934) — already reach the company and its executives. That is a liability frame, not a capabilities frame; she still says nothing about how the models work. Layer focus: infra, with an app-layer liability thread new in 2026.

Key claims (Says)

Notable predictions — with falsifiable checks

Revealed behavior (Does)

Feels

Wants the long game to vindicate her: that the 2021–25 wave changed what is thinkable even where it lost in court, and that a "constituency" (her critics' word) becomes doctrine. Fears the AI decade replaying the 2010s with the same five names. The Meta loss and the Amazon "pay its way out" settlement sting — both were her cases finished by other hands.

Hears

The neo-Brandeisian circle (Open Markets alumni, Columbia colleagues including Menand and Bradford), progressive economists and broadcasters (Krugman, Reich, Stewart), populist-right admirers (the Bannon and Vance wings she is often asked about), Mamdani's City Hall, state attorneys general, and the philanthropies funding her center. Downstream of Brandeis, Senator Sherman's "language of power," and Tim Wu.

Sees

Documents nobody else outside the firms has read: the actual cloud-provider–lab contracts produced under the 6(b) orders, and the Microsoft demand she signed. Now also New York City's development deal flow from the inside — subsidies, land, public-private partnerships — which is the reverse side of the antitrust lens.

Incentive map

Re-derived from scratch this cycle (v1 had none). Who pays: Columbia (salary); the center's six funders — Ford, Marguerite Casey, Omidyar Network, Hewlett, Nathan Cummings, Knight — all aligned with her priors; the EDC chair is reported unpaid; Substack income is unknown (17,000+ subscribers). No corporate money, board seat or consulting client found. Political principal: Mayor Mamdani. She now sits inside a government that negotiates with Amazon, Google and Microsoft as employers and tenants; her public tone on those firms is now also a municipal negotiating position. What she is selling: a legacy — that the losses were institutional (courts, a successor administration) rather than doctrinal — and a movement whose next vehicle is a city. What she can't say: that Ferguson keeping her Amazon case, Microsoft probe and Meta appeal alive vindicates the Trump FTC; that Meta lost on the merits; that the Anthropic "outsider" story runs through the partnerships she flagged. Direction of conflict: funders point with her rhetoric; the EDC job points against parts of it (subsidies and deals). Rule-25 discount: low on antitrust analysis, moderate on anything about New York, the Trump FTC, or the 2028 political map. Twin check: no --investing twin exists. Independence from her Columbia colleague Bradford is institutional-not-financial — same faculty, no co-authorship found.

Theories aligned with

What she's reacting against

Where she overlaps / splits (with Rich)

Track record

Empirical vs normative

Weak spots / open questions

Rich's take

Delta log

2026-09-21 — v1→v2 migration + validation (bulk run)

Sources

migrated v1→v2 2026-09-21 · backup: _archives/lina-khan.html.bak-20260921 · converts-from: people/lina-khan.md · AI & Society domain