[Cross-posting from X]
Sacks has written that we need to prevent regulatory capture, and Andreessen has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead and prevent it.
You guys are the capture. By any reasonable metric – a former desk in the White House, continuing access to @POTUS himself, a disclosed seat on the donor list of one AI super PAC and a blessing on a $100 million dark-money operation dedicated to pushing the administration’s AI agenda – the two of you are among the best-positioned people on the planet to decide what US AI policy becomes. Sacks, your influence remains even after you’ve left your formal role, minus the conflict-of-interest rules that came with it.
I don’t see what you see in the West Wing. If the lobbying you’re witnessing is alarming enough that you think capture is the central threat, I support your decision to fight it.
But stop pretending you’re powerless outsiders. Stop pretending the only way to prevent capture is to prevent regulation. Stop pretending a former “AI and Crypto Czar” who co-founded a multi-billion-dollar venture firm is a well-meaning populist rather than a profit-maximizing oligarch. Stop pretending the danger is safety researchers with think-tank budgets while a16z runs one of the most aggressive venture-capital lobbying operations in Washington.
Most of all, stop pretending you’re anti-regulation because you’re in favor of liability. a16z fought SB 1047, a bill that would have made frontier model developers liable for catastrophic harms – the kind of liability-based accountability Sacks now points to as an alternative to new AI regulation – with a website of form letters, one of Newsom’s own advisors on retainer, and claims the bill’s author had to formally correct in writing. When the anti-capture side needs an astroturf operation and “inflammatory distortions” – the senator’s words, not mine – to win, maybe the capture is coming from inside the house.
The market rewards firms whose anti-regulatory bets pay off. After the crypto playbook worked, it is simply good business to brand every safety rule as a cartel. Call it fighting capture if you want. It is also just giving your LPs what they want.
Actually preventing capture would create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation than “any rule is a conspiracy.” Anthropic is very unlikely to secretly run the federal government, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and prevent regulatory capture. You are the ones with the access to do it. The easiest way to keep industry from writing unfair rules is to make sure fair ones get written, not to stop the writing altogether. Backing a ten-year ban on state AI laws as the price of “preventing capture” looked like blackmail of the public and the political system. The Senate rejected it 99 to 1. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know “regulatory capture” was just another word for rules that cost you money – or a midterm-season psyop.