Tina Nguyen is an American journalist who covers US technology politics. She was a senior reporter at The Verge from February 2025 and wrote its weekly "Regulator" newsletter on disputes between the technology industry and government, including AI policy (Source: theverge.com; theverge.com). As of September 2026 The Verge lists her as a former senior reporter, and her most recent article there is dated June 24, 2026 (Source: theverge.com).
| Roles | Senior reporter, The Verge (2025–2026); founding partner and national correspondent, Puck; White House reporter, Politico; politics and media writer, Vanity Fair |
| Book | The MAGA Diaries: Life Among the Fanatics, Extremists, and True Believers that Created the Modern Right |
Background
The Verge hired Nguyen in February 2025 to cover the Trump administration, Elon Musk's role in the federal government and "the tech industry's embrace of the MAGA movement". She came from Puck, where she was a founding partner and national correspondent covering the MAGA political ecosystem. Earlier she was a White House reporter for Politico and covered politics and media at Vanity Fair (Source: theverge.com). She launched "Regulator" on August 6, 2025, describing it as covering "the latest battles between Big Tech and Big Government" across crypto, AI, cars and consumer products (Source: theverge.com).
Reporting on the administration's pre-release review pivot
In a May 6, 2026 "Regulator" column titled "How David Sacks crashed and burned in the White House", Nguyen addressed the report that the White House was considering government review of AI models before release. She wrote that it appeared to be a reversal of the administration's deregulatory record, which included repealing President Biden's AI executive order, lifting chip export controls, and executive orders aimed at punishing states that pass and enforce AI laws. The column's subheading says the administration "pulled a 180 on AI oversight, inducing Sacks' worst nightmare: more government regulation on technology." She attributed the shift, "to Washington", to three changes. The first was that Anthropic's Mythos "has genuinely spooked the national security apparatus", raising the prospect of adversaries using American AI models to attack the U.S. public and private sectors. The second was that other countries were beginning to set their own AI rules in ways that could run against U.S. interests. The third is behind the subscriber paywall and was not read (Source: theverge.com).
The column's headline and subheading present the shift as a political defeat for the deregulatory approach of AI and crypto adviser David Sacks, driven in part by Anthropic's Mythos cyber-offensive capabilities alarming the national-security apparatus. Sacks had left the AI-czar role in March 2026. He said on March 26, 2026 that he had "used up" his 130 days as a special government employee and would instead co-chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology with Michael Kratsios (Source: cnbc.com; thehill.com). See AI Pre-Release Vetting and Claude Mythos Preview.
The column explains the change in policy through a shift in influence inside the administration, prompted by a specific capability demonstration, rather than through a change in stated preferences. Transformer's reporting on the coalition that defeated the 2025 state-law moratorium similarly explains AI-policy outcomes through internal political alignments rather than through the merits of the instruments involved.
Reporting on AI super PACs
Nguyen covered the spending by AI-industry-aligned super PACs in the June 2026 Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district, which she described as a proxy contest between Anthropic and OpenAI. Before the vote she reported that the technology industry had spent $27.83 million to influence the race (Source: theverge.com). After the June 23, 2026 primary she reported that state Assemblyman Alex Bores, who had been targeted by a pro-AI super PAC, narrowly lost to Assemblyman Micah Lasher, 35 percent to 39.1 percent in the latest count. Citing FEC filings, she reported total spending of $27.41 million: $19.26 million by pro-Bores super PACs (Jobs and Democracy PAC, Dream NYC, You Can Push Back and the Guardrails Alliance) and $8.15 million by Leading the Future (Source: theverge.com). Her other 2026 AI-policy columns included "Vibe-decoding the White House-Anthropic fight over Fable" (June 17) and "Big Tech's desperate last push at AI regulation" (June 15) (Source: theverge.com).
Relationships
- related: David Sacks — the subject of the May 2026 column
- related: AI Pre-Release Vetting, Claude Mythos Preview — the policy shift and the capability she linked to it
- related: Alex Bores, Leading the Future (super PAC) — NY-12 super PAC coverage
- related: AI Industry Discourse Analysis, AI Policy (umbrella), How MAGA learned to love AI safety — Nicky Woolf (Transformer, October 2025)