The Silicon Valley Effect

Guest speaker: Chinmayi Arun, Research Scholar in Law, and Executive Director, Information Society Project (Yale Law School)

About the speaker

Dr. Chinmayi Arun is the Executive Director of the Information Society Project and a Research Scholar at Yale Law School. She is also affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Her research focuses on social media and AI, and their harms and their impact on society. Arun writes about emerging technologies from a platform governance, global political economy, tort law, and freedom of thought and expression perspective. She is interested in how they affect political rights and impact marginalized populations.

Arun has taught AI Law and Policy at Yale and has taught courses on privacy and platform governance in India. She has served as a Human Rights Officer (temporary appointment) at the United Nations, where she worked on questions of privacy, online speech, and artificial intelligence, as well as on advisory committees of international bodies like UNESCO and UN Global Pulse. She has also advised governmental entities and foundations and served on the boards of non-profit entities. She has advanced degrees in law from Yale Law School and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

About the event

Abstract from Chinmayi Arun, ‘The Silicon Valley Effect’ (2025) 61 Stanford Journal of International Law 55:

The most influential Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) companies are shaping AI’s legal order and regulatory discourse to protect their business interests and shift focus away from how their practices harm human beings. I call Big Tech’s influence on AI’s legal order the “Silicon Valley Effect” and argue that it is understudied and underestimated.

The major AI companies rely on global value chains and global markets. Capitalism drives them to exploit and experiment on vulnerable populations in permissive regulatory environments. Industry-influenced transnational legal orders—including domestic regulation and treaties—protect companies’ practices and products from regulation. Legal scholarship should account for how global informational capitalism drives the industry to influence the development of law transnationally.

Scholars who study technology’s political economy tend to advocate for localized regulation, and scholars who focus on technology’s global legal orders tend to focus on states. Focusing on isolated domestic remedies for transnational phenomena is a mistake since it permits the industry to develop harmful products and practices elsewhere. Focusing exclusively on states’ transnational influence elides the industry’s significant influence on regulatory discourse, and on foreign and domestic policy.

As the AI industry accumulates power, it can overwhelm weakening state regulators in parts of the world that could initially resist their influence. “Strong” states are one election away from vulnerability. To be resilient, they should stop relying solely on domestic regulation and develop transnationally harmonized legal orders in the public interest to curtail the industry’s power and counteract the Silicon Valley Effect.