Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher is one of the most influential technology journalists of the past three decades. She has spent her career holding the technology industry's most powerful figures accountable through rigorous interviews, reporting, and commentary, building a reputation for directness and substantive knowledge of the companies and people she covers.

She co-founded and co-hosted the technology podcast Pivot with Scott Galloway and previously hosted Recode Decode and Sway for The New York Times. She co-founded Recode, an independent technology news publication later acquired by Vox Media, and before that spent years as the lead technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She has been a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has appeared regularly as a technology analyst on CNN, MSNBC, and other broadcast media.

Her interviews with the founders and CEOs of the major technology companies, including extensive coverage of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and the major AI labs, have produced some of the most consequential moments in technology journalism: revelations, confrontations, and accountability conversations that shaped how the industry is understood and regulated.

Swisher has been an early and consistent critic of the technology industry's approach to AI ethics, data privacy, and the consolidation of power in a small number of technology platforms. She approaches AI not as a technical subject but as a civic and accountability problem.

She holds degrees from Georgetown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Her 2024 memoir Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, published by Simon & Schuster, traced the arc of her career alongside the tech industry's transformation from idealistic startup culture to consolidated platform power. The book became a bestseller and reinforced her place as one of the few journalists with the institutional knowledge and personal access to write the industry's history from inside. Her current podcast On with Kara Swisher and her continued Pivot co-hosting with Scott Galloway extend that work to AI specifically, with extensive interviews of the founders and CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and other frontier AI organizations. Across all of these venues, her position has been consistent: AI is too consequential to be left to the people who profit from it without a parallel accountability infrastructure of journalism, regulation, and public scrutiny that is at least as well-resourced as the systems it is meant to oversee.

Kara Swisher's contribution to the AI First Principles movement is the perspective of accountability journalism. She has spent three decades documenting what happens when technology companies prioritize growth over the individuals who use their systems, when accountability is diffuse, and when AI-powered platforms are designed to manipulate rather than serve.

Her reporting directly illustrates why the principles are necessary. The cases she has documented across her career, social media manipulation, AI bias in consequential decisions, the erosion of privacy at scale, are the real-world evidence base for principles like Individuals First and Deception Destroys Trust. Her endorsement of the principles represents the press accountability perspective: these principles are not aspirational guidelines but minimum requirements for technology that operates in public life.