In addition to contending with housing and affordability crises, budget and revenue challenges, and potential legal and funding conflicts with President Donald Trump, California’s next governor is likely to face a slew of tech- and artificial-intelligence-related policy questions. For years, San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s technology industry has been one of the state’s primary economic drivers, bringing in enormous amounts of investment, revenue and profits; attracting and employing talented high-wage, high-skill workers; and minting an outsized number of millionaires, billionaires and Fortune 500 companies. But there are growing concerns that the industry’s prosperity is not widely shared and that the state’s tax and regulatory structure is encouraging tech leaders and companies to leave — or at least to focus their growth elsewhere. At the same time, there’s been a growing awareness of and push to mitigate the harm posed by the industry and its products — whether from alleged anti-competitive behavior by the biggest companies, the encouragement of harmful behavior by chatbots and social networks, the inordinate consumption of energy and water by data centers, or the potential for widespread job losses due to the use of AI. The next governor will have to figure out how to strike a balance between the two sets of concerns — how to nurture the industry and encourage its growth while addressing the possible and actual harm it poses. In recent weeks, The Examiner reached out to all eight of the major gubernatorial candidates about how they would approach the tech and AI industry. Here’s how they view the industry and how they would approach some of the primary policy concerns it presents. Representatives for Katie Porter and Tony Thurmond did not respond to multiple requests for comment; The Examiner gleaned some of their positions from their websites or public statements. Autonomous trucks