After famed investor Marc Andreessen met with government officials about the future of 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 about 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 would be “damaging” to his and Silicon Valley’s interests.
He walked away believing they endorsed having the government control AI to the point of being market makers, allowing only a couple of companies who cooperated with the government to thrive. He felt they discouraged his investments in AI. “They actually said flat out to us, ‘don’t do AI startups like, don’t fund AI startups,” he said.
Obviously, we don’t know how the other folks in the meeting would recall such discussions, or even who he met with. But we can understand why such thoughts would be frightening for Andreessen in particular: His firm has backed AI startups like Elon Musk’s xAI, Mistral AI, and Character.AI.
It’s worth noting that in June 2023, long before these meetings, Andreessen published an AI manifesto called “Why AI will save the world” in which he warned against AI regulation. So this is an area that’s been on his mind for a while.
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 companies to follow. This included asking companies to share safety test results with the government and called upon Congress to evaluate how AI companies were gathering data.
The order got mixed reviews from Silicon Valley at the time. OpenAI’s Sam Altman tweeted that, while there were “some great parts” to the initiative, “it will be important not to slow down innovation by smaller companies/research teams.”
The next administration is, so far, indicating its plans to play especially nicely with AI startups. Earlier this month, Trump declared that investor VC David Sacks would be his AI and crypto czar, after which both Altman and Perplexity confirmed they would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Altman said in a statement to Bloomberg News.
Andreessen himself has spent about half his time in Mar-a-Lago since 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 some of the interviewing process for some 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 need to, because you guys know a lot about it. You guys should go build tech companies. The American tech companies should win.”