Tech billionaire and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen described a “horrifying” meeting with the Biden Administration that cemented his decision to endorse Donald Trump for president.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and a towering figure in Silicon Valley, has previously thrown his support behind Donald Trump for the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.
This marks a seismic shift in Andreessen’s political alignment, as the billionaire venture capitalist has long been an outspoken Democrat, endorsing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in prior elections.
Andreessen’s endorsement of Trump is primarily driven by his belief that Trump’s policies are more favorable for the technology sector, especially for startups.
This stands in contrast to the Biden administration’s approach, which Andreessen and his business partner, Ben Horowitz, view as overly regulatory and potentially harmful to technological innovation.
During his interview with The Free Press, Andreessen recounted his interactions with Biden administration officials, who explicitly discouraged entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from pursuing AI startups.
Andreessen painted a dystopian picture of the Biden administration’s vision for AI, revealing a strategy to consolidate AI development into the hands of a few government-aligned corporations while shutting out startups and entrepreneurs.
According to Andreessen, officials went as far as to suggest reviving Cold War-era tactics to suppress knowledge and innovation by classifying AI’s foundational mathematics.
For Andreessen, the Biden administration’s AI agenda was a wake-up call. Once a staunch Democrat, Andreessen now sees Donald Trump as the only candidate capable of fostering an environment where innovation can thrive.
Marc Andreessen:
We had meetings in DC in May where we talked to them about this, and the meetings were absolutely horrifying. We came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump.Bari Weiss:
What did you hear in those meetings?Marc Andreessen:
AI is a technology that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, “Don’t start, don’t do AI startups. Don’t fund AI startups. It’s not something that we’re going to allow to happen.They’re not going to be allowed to exist. There’s no point.” They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government, and we’re going to basically wrap them in a… I’m paraphrasing, but we’re going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We’re going to protect them from competition, we’re going to control them, and we’re going to dictate what they do.
Then I said, “I don’t understand how you’re going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there, and it’s being taught everywhere.” They literally said, “During the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community, and entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn’t proceed.”
Marc Andreessen:
If we decide we need to, we’re going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. I said, “I’ve just learned two very important things because I wasn’t aware of the former, and I wasn’t aware that you were even conceiving of doing it to the latter.”
WATCH:
