Opinion | What Really Happened at the White House Lunch That Marc Andreessen Says Sent Him to Trump

Since the election of Donald Trump, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has told one podcast after another of a May 2024 lunch in the Biden White House where he claims we and our colleagues shared a secret plan to effectively ban AI startups, which he and his partner Ben Horowitz found so alarming they left the West Wing telling each other, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”

For two years, we’ve held our tongue. We don’t know whether Andreessen has simply misremembered our discussion or purposely misrepresented it. But as the AI policy debate once again centers on questions of corporate power and government oversight, it’s time to set the record straight.

Far from a revelation about AI policy, most of that 2024 meeting was about other issues and largely amounted to two businessmen airing financial and regulatory grievances. Behind closed doors, their loudest rants focused not on AI, but on the more likely reasons they supported Trump: Biden’s proposed billionaire minimum tax and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight of cryptocurrency. Andreessen was adamant that Washington was choking the crypto industry, in which his firm is a leading investor. He demanded the administration change course on both fronts.

Andreessen has since told Ross Douthat on his podcast that we said government regulation of AI would mean “there will be no startups,” only two or three large AI companies. But we said no such thing. The experience he describes as essential to his political conversion simply never happened. For the record, here’s what did when we talked about AI.

First, Andreessen warned us to watch out for “the sex cult that wants to run America’s AI policy.” This appears to be a reference to instances of polyamory in the effective altruism movement, many of whose adherents believe AI poses existential risks to humanity. Effective altruism is a philosophy we and the Biden administration did not share.

Second, we discussed the most significant action in the Biden AI executive order: requiring leading AI companies to share safety test results with the government — an action Trump would later revoke, then revive. We emphasized that to avoid harming startups, we crafted our policy to apply only to the largest firms.

Third, Andreessen was under the mistaken impression that the Biden administration had banned, or would soon ban, open-weight AI models — models for which developers publish the model weights that enable others to refine them further, including by removing safeguards. We reminded him that we had already clarified with his team that the executive order did no such thing. In that earlier conversation, his team had fallen back to the vague charge of, “It’s not in the EO, but it’s in the ether.” In the meeting, we made clear that the order simply sought public comment on open-weight models — a process in which his own firm had participated and that we reminded them was not yet complete. Just two months later, the Biden administration affirmed that the benefits of open-weight models exceeded the risks. Still today, we do not support banning open-weight models.

Fourth, during the discussion of AI regulation, they said that there was no such thing as “classified math.” We noted that there are in fact both cryptographic secrets and nuclear ones. We most certainly did not say there was a plan — secret or otherwise — to classify the math underlying AI. Nor would it be possible to do so, since the core math of AI, linear algebra, is taught in high schools.

Finally, Andreessen and Horowitz suggested the pace of frontier AI improvement was hitting a ceiling, a point they repeated on a podcast six months later. We said the technology would get much better due to the rapid expansion of computing power, making U.S. frontier labs hard to catch. That seemed to irritate the two men, who said they were major investors in Mistral, a French startup they said focused more on AI applications than frontier development. Today, Mistral is the European leader, projecting a little over $1 billion in annualized revenue. Meanwhile, leading American AI firms reportedly take in more than $65 billion in annualized revenue.

If a transcript of the meeting existed, no one who read it would conclude that we had conveyed any intention to ban AI startups. Other AI executives we spoke with during our time in office, even those who have been critical, have later denied hearing of any such plans. Thanks in part to provisions in Biden’s AI executive orders and signature legislation on chipmaking, AI startups boomed during our time in office; theymade up roughly 20 percent of the Y Combinator class in 2021 and nearly 90 percent of the startup incubator by 2025. President Biden directed agencies to prioritize buying AI services from a range of vendors, including smaller and non-traditional ones, to the chagrin of larger companies that complained to us.

Ironically, we took these and other actions because we share some of Andreessen’s concerns about the risks of just a few companies concentrating power in AI. The scaling law that drives AI progress — computing power, when coupled with data, yields more capability — creates an enormous demand for capital that we fear only the largest companies can meet. These firms will spend around $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, more than the United States spent building the interstate highway system over 35 years. That is why during our time in office we fought to make sure the government was prepared to regulate the largest companies in the public interest.

The real question is not what happened in a single meeting in 2024. It is whether the United States has a strategy for ensuring that the most transformative technology of our time does not end up controlled by a handful of firms accountable to no one. Andreessen views regulation as a threat to innovation — but the greater threat to innovation, and indeed to society, is the failure to regulate big companies in an effective, consistent manner. That’s bad for startups and the public — a market that looks, ironically, a lot like the one Andreessen claims to fear, and the administration he endorsed may produce.

We welcome that debate. We simply ask that it be conducted on the basis of what people actually believe, what governments actually do and what actually has taken place.

Editor’s note: In a statement, Andreessen Horowitz said, “Andreessen Horowitz stands by its account of the meeting and rejects the authors’ claims.”

POLITICO occasionally publishes opinion pieces from guest authors to offer our readers a range of perspectives on the intersection of power and politics. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of POLITICO.

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