All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace? How techno-libertar

On the iconic photograph of President Trump's inauguration, some of the most powerful figures in the US tech sector are seen smiling, seated among the president’s family and directly behind Vice President Vance.

An early assumption was that the tech sector had simply yielded to Trump's pressure. Yet from the outset of his presidency, a different dynamic became visible. Rather than confronting Big Tech, the Trump administration aligned itself closely with its priorities, with several tech executives becoming deeply embedded in the US government.

In their report, Diederick van Wijk and Alexandre Gomes examine what drives the technology figures operating in Trumps political orbit. To structure their analysis, they introduce the GOALS framework, which captures the underlying motivations behind the vast political influence amassed by a distinct group of techno-libertarians.

The GOALS of the techno-libertarian consist of:

• Growth, understood as the primary driver of human progress, pursued regardless of social or environmental cost.
• Optimisation, based on the belief that social and political problems can be solved through engineering and data.
• Automation, particularly through artificial intelligence (AI), as the key instrument to realise growth and optimisation at scale.
• Liberty, defined as freedom from regulation and democratic constraint.
• Salvation, the promise that sustained technological acceleration will deliver abundance, expanded human capacities, and even the transcendence of biological limits.

In the United States, this worldview has moved from the margins into the policy mainstream. Tech leaders no longer merely lobby from the outside but increasingly shape policy from within, influencing deregulation agendas, AI acceleration strategies and the integration of private technology into state capacity, including defence, security and public administration.

For Europe, this alignment has direct consequences. The fusion of techno-libertarian ideas with US state power has translated into open hostility towards European digital regulation, which is framed as an obstacle to innovation and competitiveness. As a result, the EU faces growing pressure to dilute safeguards in areas such as AI, data protection and platform governance, risking regulatory erosion and deeper structural dependence on US-controlled technologies.

Against this backdrop, the report outlines three policy priorities for Europe: anchoring technological development in democratic governance, building European strategic capacity in critical digital infrastructures, and developing a coherent European techno-political narrative that links innovation to public purpose, accountability and democratic choice.

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Authors

Diederick van Wijk - Research Fellow at the Clingendael Institute

Alexandre Ferreira Gomes - Research Fellow at the Clingendael Institute