VC Bros Claimed They Backed Trump To Protect AI. Trump Is Shutting Down AI. It Was Always About Access & Power

from the but-he-returns-their-calls! dept

Back in July of 2024, when two of the biggest big shots in venture capital, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, explained why they had decided to go all in to back Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election, they talked up a good game about how they would support any candidate who supported their “little tech” agenda. This always rang hollow — Andreessen has been on the board of Meta for years, which is the most anti-little tech company around. They also whined about the Biden administration tech policies, in particular around AI, cryptocurrency, and antitrust. But the most telling part of the full podcast had nothing to do with tech policy at all. Marc and Ben spent a bunch of time positively offended that Joe Biden and some (only some) of his agency heads wouldn’t meet with them:

We have been spending a tremendous amount of time with Senators, Congress people on both sides of the aisle. Mark mentioned we met with President Trump. We did meet with White House officials, including Jeff Zients the chief of staff, and Jake Sullivan the National Security advisor, Gina Raimondo the Commerce Secretary and so forth. We have not met with President Biden. We attempted and failed.

….

We tried to meet with Gary Gensler — he’s the chair of the SEC, he’s running this campaign against crypto. We’re the largest crypto investors or largest blockchain investors in the world, and we’ve requested meetings with him at least a half a dozen times. I even was able to get in contact with his office mate at MIT, who said ‘surely Gary will meet with you, it’s so important that he meets with you’… and he couldn’t get us the meeting.

Meanwhile, they seemed to love the fact that Donald Trump would have dinner with them, and Trump family members would vacation with them. Here’s Marc:

Ben and I had dinner with the former president 10 days ago at Bedminster, his golf club in New Jersey, and had a three-hour dinner. And so, you know, we were quite literally just with him… you know, he’s a very complicated guy, people have a lot of opinions, but when you know somebody like that — you know the family — it really hits hard

And here’s Ben:

Marc and I have both gotten to know the family, particularly Jared and Ivanka and their kids — Arabella, Joseph and Theo. And in fact, like, Ivanka and the kids were just at my house. We went to see David Copperfield, all that.

The real complaint was never about policy. It was always about embracing the fascism of it all, in which they (Marc & Ben, not the wider tech industry) would get to write the rules in a way that helped them personally, even if it fucked over actual innovation. Indeed, they seemed tickled that after they had dinner with Donald Trump, he rewrote part of his campaign policy platform. These total political novices were so overwhelmed that they could get one side to listen at all that they figured it was obviously the side to back. They seem positively giddy that Trump was willing to make changes to his platform based on their conversations.

There was also a longer discussion regarding how Marc and Ben contrast what they think (misleadingly) was Biden’s policy on AI vs. what Trump’s policy would be. My favorite bit is where Marc says they “confirmed” with Trump what his AI policy would be, as if the guy doesn’t have a decades-long history of promising one thing to whoever is in front of him and then doing something entirely different.

Ben: Let’s talk about Trump’s proposal. We actually discussed this with him when we had dinner

Marc: Yeah, we discussed all these topics and confirmed all this. So: Chapter Three, “Build the Greatest Economy in History.” Bullet five, “Champion Innovation.” Item two, “Artificial Intelligence”:

“We will repeal the dangerous executive order that hinders AI innovation and imposes radical ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, we will support AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing.”

Ben: That sounds like a good plan to me!

When we met with him, I thought his comment was really insightful and good. It’s funny — I would contrast the Biden administration’s approach, particularly in the inner core of the White House, with Trump’s approach. The White House has a very complicated model of things. They think they know a lot — they know that startups aren’t going to be important, that only a few companies will be able to field big models. They know all these things that we don’t know, and we don’t. They’ve never heard of distillation, apparently, or how AI is actually working in practice. It’s a very complex view of the world.

Trump’s view was very simple. What he said to us is, “Look, AI is very scary, but we absolutely have to win — because if we don’t win and China wins, that’s a very bad world.” And I think that’s actually a more correct view. That’s basically true. When things start happening that do need regulation, then we should regulate them. But to anticipate it would be kind of like saying, “Oh, the automobile is coming out, and we think somebody’s going to make an automobile that drives 500 miles an hour nobody can control, so we’re going to just outlaw cars now.” That’s a little bit this approach to AI — “Well, we think in the future there’s going to be a sentient model.” Now, nobody has built anything anywhere that’s on the way to sentience. And so doing that — what we have are these great things that can tutor kids, so “No, you can’t tutor kids, because maybe somebody will come up with an idea that will make AGI, and so we have to cut off the tutors.” It’s that kind of thinking, which is quite scary, I would say.

That final bit is quite telling as well. Biden’s plan was too complex. Trump’s plan was simple. Perhaps that’s because he’s a simpleton who has no understanding of actual policy tradeoffs. Biden’s team definitely made some decisions I strongly disagreed with regarding tech policy, but the “complexity” they whine about is because the issues here are, legitimately, complex.

So, um, given that the Trump administration has basically put in place a much dumber and much worse version of what Marc & Ben said Biden was doing… clearly they’re out there admitting they were wrong, right?

In just the last few weeks we not only had the US government force Anthropic to turn off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models (even as the NSA itself was finding them useful!), it also made OpenAI limit the release of GPT 5.6. Meanwhile there are reports that the Trump administration is furious that Meta has been the one US frontier model provider that won’t let them pre-vet its AI models and decide which ones can and can’t be released.

So, two years ago Marc & Ben were yucking it up about how the Trump admin would stop trying to hold back and regulate big models, which they (falsely) claimed the Biden admin was doing. And now that the Trump admin is doing exactly that… it’s crickets from Marc and Ben.

Apparently their real concerns had nothing to do with such policies after all. Marc and Ben won’t tell you that directly, of course. But someone in their general orbit already has.

A little while ago the Bulwark’s Tim Miller did an interview with Jason Calacanis, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor/gadfly, discussing a variety of issues regarding the tech industry. I only came across this because Karl Bode’s discussion regarding the SpaceX IPO mentioned it, to point out some delusional thinking about how Starlink works. But the rest of the interview is actually a lot of Calacanis saying the quiet part out loud regarding how Silicon Valley bros view all this fascism and corruption: positively, because they think they can handle fascism and corruption.

Miller pushes Calacanis on some points regarding why the Silicon Valley VC bros still support Trump’s fascism when it’s so obviously against things like open innovation and the free market, and Jason (almost gleefully) mocks Tim for just not getting it. He happily admits that the tech bros don’t have any actual principles at all. They just understand transactions, and Trump remains transactional.

Jason lays it all out as Tim points out that if a President Kamala Harris did a tiny bit of what President Trump is doing right now, the VC bros would be losing their minds, and Jason says none of that matters, because the VC bros understand that as long as everything is corrupt and “coin-operated” then they understand the game. Their biggest fear is that they’re just not that important, and policy might get made with no one caring what they thought:

Tim Miller: I want to give you a counterfactual. Kamala Harris did win. Okay. She gets in there and she puts an illegal tax on the Silicon Valley companies unilaterally. It doesn’t go through Congress. Puts a tax on them. It’s not legal, but she just does it. She says, “It’s an emergency. I’ve decided I have the right to do a, you know, whatever — windfall profits tax on all these companies. I’m going to do that.” And then she garnishes money from the CEOs. She makes them come to her and beg her for absolution to get around it. Sometimes she grants it, sometimes she doesn’t — kind of based on whim, kind of based on whether Doug is friends with the person, kind of based on whether they’ve given money to her. And then the Supreme Court comes back and says, “No, actually you’ve got to give the money back to the companies.” And she says, “No, actually I don’t want to. I’m not going to do that. In fact, I’m going to threaten them, and maybe I might actually take a percentage.” Donald Trump just suggested he might take a percentage of the company for the government. If Kamala Harris had said that, you and all your Silicon Valley buddies and the Wall Street Journal would be losing their minds, and it would [be] communism.

Jason Calacanis: So you’re making this analogy to tariffs?

Tim: This is what Trump is doing — with tariffs, and with taking a percentage of Intel, and he’s suggesting he’s going to take a percentage of AI companies. He tariffed them illegally. He made them come in and beg for their lunch. That’s left-wing autocratic politics is what he’s doing.

Jason: Yeah. I can educate you as to why they don’t have a problem with it and why you do. You are looking at it from a moral perspective, and from a logic perspective of like, “Well, if you were okay with one side doing it and not okay with the other side doing it, this doesn’t make intellectual sense to you.” Totally understand where Tim Miller is coming from. This intellectually does not make sense. Let me tell you on a business level what this means.

The tariffs, when they’re under 15%, when they actually hit, are easily absorbed on one side or the other — the folks who are selling items, or the folks who are providing those. They each make a bit of a concession, and maybe you raise the cost of something a little bit, but it’s not as dramatic as the left feels it is. It was chaotic, but when it actually hit the ground, it made no difference to these businesses. So, a lot of hand-wringing for not a lot of impact.

And you find it offensive, reasonably so, that people have to go bend the knee and bring a gold bar and wait in line. And South Park did a whole sendup of it — that you have to bend the knee and make your donation. That’s what business people like. They like transactions. You may not like it. You may think it’s crummy. Business people love to have a coin-operating situation.

Tim: I guess. But this whole Biden thing is crazy. It’s like — he didn’t even raise taxes on them. Trump has raised tax. You can tell me that fine, the tariff thing is inconsequential. Okay, fine. But the last federal corporate tax hike was in ’93. Like, they haven’t — they’ve only gotten cuts, from Obama, from Biden. They haven’t faced a corporate tax hike in 30 years or more. So who — why, who cares? Why are they so upset about the Biden situation?

Jason: Because Biden didn’t return their calls.

Tim: So the tariff isn’t a big deal. The phone call is. That’s fine. All right.

Jason: No, it actually is. You’re brushing that off. And this is where you have a blind spot, Tim. Respectfully, you have a blind spot. If you can get in the room with the person, if you can get in the room with the administration, and then you can shape policy and you can say, “Hey, here’s what we’re trying to accomplish, and hey, can you help us with this, and this regulation doesn’t make sense?” — that actually is a preferable situation to not getting your phone call returned. And if [that’s] what you have to pay for it — I’m not saying this is my belief; you have me on here to explain Silicon Valley and the business side, I’m explaining it to you — they much prefer bending the knee, having to show up for the Melania documentary. Tim Cook’s like, “I gotta show up for a documentary. That sucks. I gotta bring a gold bar. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep selling iPhones.”

It’s possible this is correct, but that’s basically the definition of Mussolini’s brand of corporate fascism, when the business elites team up with an autocratic ruler to better control the entirety of society, not for the benefit of society or the public good, but for their own.

Early on in the second Trump administration, I wrote an article titled Fascism for First Time Founders, about how this tends to end very badly for the business leaders who embrace it. I stand by that article, and think it’s even more relevant today than it was then. Fascist regimes don’t tend to last long, and the business leaders who embrace fascism in pursuit of becoming all-powerful oligarchs tend not to come to happy endings, no matter how wealthy it makes them for a short period of time, or which leaders are willing to return their calls.

You’d think that some of these “visionary” business leaders could look beyond the current administration and get a sense of where this story is heading. Apparently, that’s too much to ask.

Dean Ball, a policy analyst on AI who was placed in the White House by Silicon Valley folks to write Trump’s original AI policy (which was published to great fanfare and then totally ignored) has written an article about how the Trump AI policy is a total mess right now, where it’s based on whims where literally no one knows what’s allowed (the situation Marc & Ben falsely claimed would happen under Biden).

1. When President Trump signed it earlier this month, I argued that the Executive Order on Cyber and AI, which claimed to establish a voluntary testing program for frontier AI models, was really establishing a de facto involuntary licensing/preapproval regime for frontier models. This analysis has proven correct. First the administration revoked public access to Fable, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, because of security fears. Now, it appears that OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 is being limited to only a small set of US companies at the request of the US government.
2. One major problem with this, as implemented, is that nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed.
3. When I say “nobody” I mean it literally: the administration itself does not seem to know what safety standards or best practices a company would have to observe for them to be comfortable with the broad release of a model that matches or exceeds Mythos in capability.
4. This means that, every time a lab asks if they can release their model to the general public, the answer from the government will be “no.” This will be true until there is some sort of safety standard or specification that gives the government a sense that the models are safe.

Ball doesn’t attribute any of this to a deliberate authoritarian agenda, but rather argues that the AI has just gotten so good that the doomers’ fears are finally coming true. That’s the charitable read. The simpler explanation is right there in the Calacanis interview: these VC bros thought they could control Trump and are still over the moon he returns their calls, even as he does all the things they claimed would destroy the industry.

But he returns their calls. For now, at least.

The main issue is that we have a power mad president, surrounded by yes-men and sycophants pushing him to grab more power. And you have the Silicon Valley elites who have the president’s ear egging him on… because he’ll return their calls and because, as Jason said, they understand a coin-operated president.

Even if it’s worse for innovation. Even if it’s worse for society. But it might be better for their bank accounts (for a while) and their egos to be a part of making the AI trains run on time. Until they don’t. Because situations like this are woefully unstable, and at some point, Trump and the MAGA crew won’t actually be in charge any more.

Marc and Ben claimed what they feared most in 2024 was a presidential administration that would shut down the most powerful AI models, regulating math, and hand-picking a few winners and losers. And that’s why they supported Trump. Now that Trump has gone way further than Biden even suggested he’d go in limiting powerful AI models, there’s been no public indication I can find that Marc and Ben regret their choice as president. After all, he’s still coin-operated and he still returns their calls.

Jason explained it perfectly. They bend the knee, they get in the room, they bring the gold bar. That it doesn’t lead to innovation policy that helps tech (little or big) doesn’t really matter. Trump returns their phone calls. They get to feel big. They still get richer. The point was always about access. They got it.

That’s the corporatist fascism they always wanted anyway. Business elites teaming up with an autocratic ruler not to figure out what’s best for the public or for innovation. But for power and control. They get to decide who gets what innovation. What models are allowed. Who can innovate.

The problem with Biden, apparently, wasn’t so much that he wanted to put some safety guardrails on AI. It was that he wouldn’t let the VC bros sit with him while deciding who the winners and losers would be. But here we have it. Business elites and an autocratic ruler picking winners and losers. History is pretty consistent about where this all ends up.

The VC bros said it was about policy. It wasn’t. But no one should ever accept Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pretending they speak for “little tech” or innovation ever again. Not after this.

Filed Under: ai policy, ben horowitz, corruption, donald trump, fascism, jason calacanis, joe biden, marc andreessen, transactions

Companies: a16z, anthropic, openai