Sarah Rogers: Free Speech, AI Diplomacy, and What America Owes Its Allies

In this conversation recorded at the A16Z American Dynamism Summit, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers explains how public diplomacy differs from traditional diplomacy — it governs the relationship between the U.S. government and foreign publics, encompassing cultural exchanges, media assets, and the broader information environment. She describes inheriting an apparatus under the prior administration that submitted content removal requests to platforms like Twitter and Meta, and funded NGOs to curate what Americans could see online. Under her tenure, she has reversed that mandate, pursuing transparency about prior censorship and making freedom of expression a primary diplomatic priority.

Rogers frames digital freedom as a national security issue, drawing a parallel between every major communications revolution — the printing press, telegraph, internet — and the recurring institutional impulse to control new technology. She argues the U.S. government went too far in the name of fighting disinformation, with well-intentioned actors creating opaque censorship mechanisms that suppressed legitimate speech. Her new approach favors user empowerment tools like X's Community Notes and censorship circumvention technology like VPNs, rather than upstream content suppression.

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on the European Union's digital regulations, which Rogers views as a censorship contagion threatening American companies and free speech norms. She highlights a 2024 letter from EU official Thierry Breton threatening Elon Musk with regulatory penalties if he aired an interview with then-candidate Donald Trump on X, linking it to a separate 120 million euro fine over blue check verification practices. Rogers argues this represents viewpoint-skewed enforcement of ostensibly content-neutral regulations — a pattern she also encountered in her prior legal work defending the NRA against discriminatory banking regulations.

On AI specifically, Rogers endorses Tyler Cowen's concept of 'AI with a Western soul' — AI that reasons individualistically, prioritizes user consent, and operates on rules-based principles — as the most powerful soft power tool the U.S. can deploy globally. She warns against foreign regulatory frameworks that could undermine the competitive edge of American AI companies, citing threats to fair use doctrine, demands for model weight transparency that could enable adversary reverse-engineering, and vague strict-liability content regulations that would create a chilling effect on AI development.

Rogers also addresses how the U.S. government can encourage private sector free speech, recommending clear and viewpoint-neutral regulations, standing up for American companies when foreign governments threaten them for hosting protected speech, and distinguishing between viewpoint-based content suppression (bad) and user-controlled filtering of spam or foreign-origin content (acceptable). She concludes by affirming the importance of democratic deliberative processes — courts, legislatures — over Silicon Valley executive or employee fiat in making decisions about AI's societal role.