VC giant Andreessen Horowitz will give politicians money to save Big Tech

As governments the world over begin to regulate Big Tech, investment giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has announced plans to give money to politicians who “supports an optimistic technology-enabled future”.

Every penny it donates will go to support “like-minded candidates and oppose candidates who aim to kill America’s advanced technological future”, said a16z Co-founder Ben Horowitz.

“As we’ve seen with the regulation of nuclear power, misguided and politicised regulation can kill an industry and greatly exacerbate problems like climate change,” he wrote in a blog post.

“We believe that advancing technology is critical for humanity’s future, so we will, for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values specifically for technology,” he added.

Horowitz said that we are non-partisan, one issue voters.

“If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them,” he added.

Horowitz said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to uplift all of humanity to an unprecedented quality of living and must not be choked off in its infancy.

“We can do this by requiring that AI behaves within the law and rules of our society without regulating math, FLOPs, methods of R&D, and other misguided ideas,” he added.

Decentralised technologies from the blockchain/crypto/web3 ecosystem will create a fairer, more inclusive economy than the centralised, monopoly-enabling technologies of web 2 and the industrial-era financial system.

“Still, we need clear regulation to eliminate bad actors exploiting the technology for nefarious purposes,” the a16z co-founder wrote.