Nadella Discusses Tech and Policy in D.C.

If you're a tech CEO with a $1 trillion market cap and without a federal antitrust investigation breathing down your neck, you actually look forward to visiting D.C. In a victory lap keynote at a Microsoft summit in the capital yesterday, CEO Satya Nadella spoke about the company's stances on tech design and policy, which are increasingly one and the same.

Nadella on the issues: "Trust is everything" in the relationship between government and tech providers. Privacy is a human right. A federal privacy law is needed. Ethical AI development is key.

"We want to partner with government," he said. That coincidentally includes the agency with the biggest checkbook:

• Microsoft's chasing JEDI, a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon.
• Last year, the two inked a $480 million contract for Microsoft to outfit troops with HoloLens headsets.

+ While we're talking policy: China is Microsoft's second biggest R&D hub. Satya doesn't want a sour U.S.-China relationship to cramp his research style. "A lot of AI research happens in the open, and the world benefits from knowledge being open," he recently told the BBC.