Microsoft’s president warns the White House

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Sam Sutton (0:32)

Hello, and welcome to Decoded. I'm Sam Sutton.

Brendan Bordelon (0:35)

And I'm Brendan Bordelon. Today on the show, I talked to Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft, about the Trump administration's attempts to regulate the AI industry. We'll hear his thoughts on the new Superintelligence Task Force, and why he feels the administration is wrong to target Microsoft's green card program.

Sam Sutton (0:51)

Plus, a bank has brought on a former Biden official to expand its footprint beyond Silicon Valley. Will it help Erebor Bank shake its current perception?

Brendan, how's Dublin?

Brendan Bordelon (1:05)

It's been good. The weather is surprisingly nice for Ireland, actually. It was very sunny yesterday, and I don't think I've actually been rained on at all yet. Food's great, and of course, the Irish hospitality is fantastic. I have not had so much time to enjoy it, because I am here reporting on the International AI Summit, which is a very fancy name for an European Union-backed conference that is being held at the Royal Dublin Society. Again, a very fancy name for basically a big conference hall in South Dublin. The European Union is trying to sort of find its way forward on artificial intelligence. I think many of our listeners are probably aware that the big companies, certainly the frontier companies in AI, are all based in the United States, and Europe is kind of looking jealously across the Atlantic Ocean, wondering what they can do to share in some of that tech wealth.

Sam Sutton (1:53)

And you got a chance to talk to Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft.

Brendan Bordelon (1:56)

Yeah, that's right, he made about 30 minutes for us to speak from the sidelines of this summit. He was here, surprisingly enough, to push for AI regulation. But we also actually got into a lot of US-specific issues as well.

Sam Sutton (2:08)

And what stuck out to you in that conversation?

Brendan Bordelon (2:10)

Yeah, so I did ask Smith about the decision last week by the Trump administration to suspend Microsoft from allowing their foreign workers to apply for permanent residency, green cards. This program has existed for decades in the United States. Smith is a careful guy, he's a diplomatic guy. He was pretty forceful in his response to the administration, which I got to admit was a little surprising. So here's what he had to say. Last week, the Trump administration suspended Microsoft's participation in a green card program, denying some of its high skilled foreign employees a path to permanent residency.

Vice President JD Vance said Microsoft should be hiring Americans for these STEM positions and also suggested that you and some other companies engaged in fraud as you were applying for these permanent residency positions. Was Microsoft engaging in fraud when it sought permanent residency for some of its skilled foreign workers?

Brad Smith (2:57)

No, I would say a few things. First, we've always been committed to a high integrity and high compliance immigration group.

And I believe we have upheld that commitment in everything that we have done. Second, we're proud to be an American company, and we hire Americans far more than we do people from outside the United States for our jobs inside the United States. As we said when that announcement was made, we felt that someone I think had failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers, because ultimately, the basis for the argument seemed to be more about numbers than specific practices. And what was presented as Microsoft replacing 6,000 people who lost their jobs with 9,000 foreigners, was frankly completely off base. The vast majority of both the visa applications and the green card applications went not for new employees, but for people who had already been working at Microsoft. And frankly, a lot of these visa renewals are for people who've been at Microsoft for many years. And unfortunately, it's just because the green card backlog is so long. But there's another fact that either folks in the administration were unaware of or somebody just didn't put the numbers together properly. Because I think it left the public with this sense that the only people Microsoft hired last year were from outside the United States. We hired 9,000, actually 9,200 American workers in our last fiscal year. And that was left out of the narrative. The other thing that we feel very passionately about is we run the company based on merit.