After famed investor Marc Andreessen met with government officials concerning the way forward for tech last May, he was “very scared” and described the meetings as “absolutely horrifying.” These meetings played a key role on why he endorsed Trump, he told journalist Bari Weiss this week on her podcast.
What scared him most was what some said concerning the government’s role in AI, and what he described as a young staff who were “radicalized” and “out for blood” and whose policy ideas could be “damaging” to his and Silicon Valley’s interests.
He walked away believing they endorsed having the federal government control AI to the purpose of being market makers, allowing only a few firms who cooperated with the federal government to thrive. He felt they discouraged his investments in AI. “They really said flat out to us, ‘don’t do AI startups like, don’t fund AI startups,” he said.
Obviously, we don’t understand how the folks within the meeting would recall such discussions, and even who he met with. But we will understand why such thoughts could be frightening for Andreessen specifically: His firm has backed AI startups like Elon Musk’s xAI, Mistral AI, and Character.AI.
It’s value noting that in June 2023, long before these meetings, Andreessen published an AI manifesto called “Why AI will save the world” by which he warned against AI regulation. So that is an area that’s been on his mind for some time.
Publicly, the administration has enacted less drastic measures around AI than what Andreessen recalled. In October 2023, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that contained a series of voluntary commitments for AI firms to follow. This included asking firms to share safety test results with the federal government and called upon Congress to judge how AI firms were gathering data.
The order got mixed reviews from Silicon Valley on the time. OpenAI’s Sam Altman tweeted that, while there have been “some great parts” to the initiative, “it is going to be necessary to not decelerate innovation by smaller firms/research teams.”
The subsequent administration is, thus far, indicating its plans to play especially nicely with AI startups. Earlier this month, Trump declared that investor VC David Sacks could be his AI and crypto czar, after which each Altman and Perplexity confirmed they’d donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I’m desperate to support his efforts to make sure America stays ahead,” Altman said in an announcement to Bloomberg News.
Andreessen himself has spent about half his time in Mar-a-Lago because the election. He confirmed to Weiss the speculation that he was involved in Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, describing himself as an “an unpaid volunteer.” He also said that, at Mar-a-Lago, he’s “been involved in a few of the interviewing process for a few of the officials coming in.”
Andreessen said he felt hopeful about Trump’s approach to tech, saying Trump told him, “I don’t know much about tech, but I don’t have to, since you guys know rather a lot about it. You guys should go construct tech firms. The American tech firms should win.”
