Derek Thompson

I wasn't in the room.

I have no idea what the Biden folks said to Marc Andreessen.

But here's like a statistical fact.

Y Combinator is probably the most famous startup incubator in the Bay Area for new companies.

So if you want to understand like what are new companies in America interested in in the realm of tech, go to Y Combinator.

Under Joe Biden, the share of Y Combinator companies that were AI companies rose from something like 20 to 90%.

So this idea that the Biden administration wasn't going to allow AI startups to exist

certainly runs in the face of the evidence that dozens and dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds, of AI startups not only existed under Joe Biden, but the number kept growing.

So I don't know what that conversation exactly was about, but if the Biden administration's policy goal was to stop AI startups from happening...

That was the least successful Joe Biden policy that exists, and it has some competition.

It's a competitive category.

That's point number one.

Point number two is I would point out the obvious irony that Marc Andreessen supports an administration that is currently dead set on controlling, controlling Anthropic and destroying the company if they aren't able to control their defense relationships.

That's a little ironic.

If your fear of the Biden administration is that they were going to exert too much regulatory power over the artificial intelligence industry, then why aren't you unbelievably furious at the amount of regulatory might currently being brought in order to punish Anthropic?

There's an irony.

More broadly, what do the tech oligarchs want?

I don't know.

But I think it's always important when describing a group that feels like an outsider group.

This happens with