The News
Silicon Valley spent a decade avoiding the government. Now that it’s building weapons and surveillance tech, some — most notably, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei — want to keep one hand on the off switch.
David Ulevitch, the partner who runs a16z’s America-first fund, “American Dynamism,” disagrees.
“I can’t even personally imagine ever putting myself in that situation,” Ulevitch said of Amodei’s fight with the Pentagon, which has splintered Silicon Valley over how the US government should be able to use technology provided by AI companies.
“I don’t want to be the person they call and say, can we hit the enter button on this command or not,” Ulevitch said in the latest episode of Semafor’s Compound Interest show. “But I also don’t have a God complex.”
He said the different approaches by Anthropic and OpenAI, which was much more conciliatory to the Pentagon, to how their AI is used in war will be a “sorting algorithm” for employees. The same goes for voters, who will decide how AI is used in their communities: Ulevitch is on the board of Flock Safety, the camera company whose partnership with Amazon’s Ring doorbells was recently scrapped after a Super Bowl ad that spurred panopticon-anxious backlash.
“There are other people that say, we elect leaders, leaders make laws, there’s lots of oversight … I trust that democratic system, so I want the people that serve our country to have the best capabilities,” Ulevitch said. “Some jurisdictions will say, wait, we don’t want crime here, and we are going to trade off having license-plate readers.”
Know More
Ulevitch’s American Dynamism fund has been at the heart of the America-First shift in Silicon Valley. A16z co-founder Marc Andreessen was an early convert to President Donald Trump’s agenda and epitomized the push toward national security, AI, energy, and defense — the focus areas of the $1.8 billion (actually, a carefully chosen $1.776 billion) fund that Ulevitch runs.
For decades, Silicon Valley proudly backed capital-light infinitely scalable code; Andreessen’s “Software is Eating the World” essay from 2011 captured the venture community’s blueprint for the past quarter-century. Their shift now to financing-heavy, hardware-first products — rockets, drones, nuclear reactors — is a test of whether those skills will transfer, or whether venture capitalists have convinced themselves because they are ideologically aligned with these sectors.
Ulevitch pushed back on that idea, saying that reconfigurable, robot-dominated factories change the economics of hardware and manufacturing and the skills they require.
“Previous conceived beliefs around, ‘oh, well hardware is so hard, it’s so low margin, it can’t possibly work.’ Well, that’s not true,” Ulevitch said. “When we start building automation into the factory … we think that you can get — with a high rate of production — high-margin outcomes.”