Lina Khan is a legal scholar who served as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission from 2021 to 2025. Appointed at age 32, she led an FTC agenda focused on concentration among large technology firms, labor and consumer-protection issues, and, beginning in 2023, the competitive and consumer implications of generative AI. She was replaced as Chair by Andrew Ferguson on January 20, 2025, and is a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. On July 22, 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed her board chair of the city's Economic Development Corporation (Source: gothamist.com).
| Role | Former Chair, Federal Trade Commission (2021–2025) |
| Current | Professor of Law, Columbia Law School; board chair, NYC Economic Development Corporation (from July 2026) |
| Known for | Amazon's Antitrust Paradox (2017); FTC 6(b) AI Partnerships Study |
Background
Khan is best known for her 2017 law-review article Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, which reframed modern antitrust analysis around platform power. She was appointed FTC Chair in 2021 at age 32.
AI-relevant actions at the FTC
FTC 6(b) AI Partnerships Study (2024–2025)
Khan opened a Section 6(b) study into strategic investments and partnerships among OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, and Amazon, examining whether such partnerships shape competitive dynamics in generative AI markets. The resulting 6(b) staff report is a detailed US government document on frontier-AI market structure. See FTC 6(b) Staff Report: Partnerships Between Cloud Service Providers and AI Developers.
Consumer protection
Under Khan, the FTC took early action on deceptive claims about AI capabilities ("AI washing"); use of AI in algorithmic pricing and discrimination; AI chatbot harms, including to minors (precursor context for later SB 243-style concerns); and deepfake-enabled fraud.
Algorithmic pricing and antitrust
Khan's FTC helped operationalize the position that algorithmic coordination among firms can constitute anticompetitive conduct, a line of thinking connected to Algorithmic Pricing and Antitrust.
Positions and statements
Khan's frame is that the pattern of platform-era concentration is repeating in frontier AI, with compute, data, and distribution advantages concentrating in a small number of firms with existing platform power, and that antitrust enforcement should engage this structure early rather than waiting for post-hoc abuses. This frame is in tension with the posture of her successor Andrew Ferguson and with the administration view expressed in America's AI Action Plan.
Relationships
- related: FTC 6(b) Study on AI Partnerships and Investments — initiated under Khan; see also FTC 6(b) Staff Report: Partnerships Between Cloud Service Providers and AI Developers.
- contradicts: Andrew Ferguson — successor Chair with a notably different framing of AI antitrust.
- related: Joe Biden — appointed by Biden; aligned with Biden-era competition posture.
- related: Algorithmic Pricing and Antitrust — Khan's FTC helped build the doctrinal basis.
- instance-of: AI Race Dynamics — Khan's posture is one pole of the US debate over whether concentration in AI is a feature or a bug of race dynamics.