Sen Warren Accuses White House of Using Tariffs to Help Big Tech

Senator Elizabeth Warren says the Trump administration’s tariffs have helped tech companies escape regulation.

The Massachusetts Democrat issued a letter Wednesday (April 1) to U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Ambassador Jamieson Greer on what she called the White House’s efforts to help Big Tech “evade other countries’ commonsense regulations,” including ones that protect people from AI-generated deepfake abuse.

Warren, who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, cited the recent example of Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot at Elon Musk’s xAI, which generated millions of sexually explicit deepfake images, leading to a swift response from authorities in countries around the world.

“The countries that took action against Grok—either by immediately cracking down on the app or taking steps to hold the company accountable after the fact—were able to do so because of their robust domestic online safety laws—the very laws that the Trump Administration and USTR have taken aim at in their ‘bilateral’ trade negotiations,” Warren wrote.

PYMNTS has contacted the USTR for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

Warren contends that — despite President Trump’s claim that he instituted tariffs to help American workers — the duties have in fact hurt the manufacturing space: 88,000 jobs have disappeared and the manufacturing trade deficit is up $62 billion.

“Simultaneously, Big Tech has received exemptions from many key tariffs affecting the industry and has benefited from Trump’s strategy of bullying other countries into repealing their pro-consumer and pro-competition policies,” the senator said.

The letter comes days after a report from the European Central Bank (ECB) showing that the burden of tariffs had fallen mostly on U.S. importers and consumers.

“We find that costs associated with higher tariffs are passed down the pricing chain, with consumers currently bearing around a third of the tariff burden,” the bank wrote in an economic bulletin published earlier this week.

The ECB added that if higher tariffs are expected to stick around for a longer period, evidence from American companies suggests they will pass a greater share of the cost of these duties onto consumers. In the long term, this figure could increase to more than half as businesses lose their ability to absorb costs.

“Additionally, if the extent to which exporters absorb tariffs remains limited in scope, as reported above, this implies that U.S. firms would absorb around 40% of higher tariff costs in the longer term,” the ECB wrote.