Ex-Meta policy chief Nick Clegg warns AI outruns democracy

Meta’s former policy chief warns that AI-era influence is outrunning democratic control.

Nick Clegg left Meta weeks before tech’s biggest names turned up at Donald Trump’s inauguration, and he says that timing was no accident. In a wide-ranging Guardian interview promoting his new book, the former UK deputy prime minister argues Silicon Valley shifted from political wariness to political embrace—and he wouldn’t go with it.

He casts the change starkly: an industry that once insisted on neutrality now behaves like a political actor. The stakes are higher than one résumé update. If Clegg is right, the AI boom isn’t just rearranging markets—it’s rearranging who governs whom.

The culture that made capture easy

Clegg describes a Valley that prides itself on iconoclasm yet marches in lockstep. He calls it “cloyingly conformist,” a place where people mimic the same clothes, cars, and podcasts. The homogeneity isn’t just aesthetic. It accelerates consensus—on product bets, on messaging, and, lately, on politics. The shift was fast.

Why the pivot? Regulation abroad, antitrust at home, and a China AI arms race that pulls tech deeper into national security. Aligning with Washington looks like strategic risk management. It also looks like power seeking more power.

Machismo meets grievance

Clegg’s sharpest critique targets a mindset. He argues that many elite founders and executives blend swagger with self-pity, viewing scrutiny as persecution despite extraordinary wealth and leverage. That friction matters. It predisposes the sector to grievance politics and to narratives that treat oversight as oppression. The mood has flipped.

He carefully separates people from patterns. He declines to condemn Mark Zuckerberg personally, while attacking the broader culture that rewards chest-beating and victimhood. The distinction is important. It points to structures, not saviors.

What changed at Meta—and what didn’t

Clegg won’t attack Meta’s recent policy moves, including a shift toward community-driven corrections and looser guardrails on hot-button topics. He acknowledges earlier overreach during the pandemic, when public and media pressure skewed toward removal. He also still defends the 2021 suspension of Trump for violating content rules, even as the precedent troubles him. It was a private company making a public decision about a public figure. That tension remains.

Inside the company, Clegg helped build process: an independent oversight board; controlled experiments on feed design; expanded parental tools. Those are governance-like features grafted onto a platform. They are not a substitute for law. That’s the boundary line he wants legislatures—not CEOs—to draw.

The AI phase: from platforms to infrastructure

Clegg’s warning is more about tomorrow than yesterday. He expects “agentic” AI to nest into phones and wearables within five years, quietly running errands across the web. Convenience will scale. So will dependency.

When that happens, platform policy becomes infrastructure policy. Who owns the models and the compute? Who sets the default behaviors? He recounts a UK Treasury conversation that puts the scale in human terms: a single company can now “plough” tens of billions a year into AI infrastructure. That’s state-level spending. Voters never appropriated it.

This doesn’t automatically make companies stronger than governments. They don’t declare wars or raise taxes. But they do build rails that governments now ride—identity, payments, content distribution, AI assistants. Control those rails and you shape the menu of democratic choices before the vote is cast. That’s the new asymmetry.

Europe, America, and the legitimacy gap

Clegg is blunt about the geopolitical divergence. In Europe, policy leads capital; in the U.S., capital outruns policy. China couples both through the state. Europe risks “museum status” without tech-scale investment. America risks a legitimacy gap if a handful of firms set the operating system of daily life without consent. Choose your deficit.

His remedy is procedural rather than punitive: parliaments should set age rules for teens on social platforms; regulators should set disclosure and red-team standards for AI systems; courts should remain the arbiter of speech limits in the gray zone between odious and unlawful. Translation: pull judgment back into institutions voters can fire. It’s accountability, not catharsis.

Read Clegg with caveats

Clegg is promoting a book and defending a record. He is a participant as well as a critic. Some of the measures he describes are contested, and his vantage point—Brussels, Westminster, Menlo Park—colors the analysis. Fair enough. He is also surfacing the core question of the AI era with unusual clarity.

Who decides? That’s the whole ballgame.

Why this matters:

• Tech’s rapid political embrace shows how AI infrastructure power converts into political leverage, challenging the premise that platforms are neutral utilities.
• Democratic legitimacy now hinges on building rules that match compute-era scale—not just better trust-and-safety playbooks inside private firms.