Of all the groups celebrating former President Donald Trump’s re-election this week, maybe no one has more of a reason to celebrate than his boosters in the tech world. Given the key role Elon Musk played in bringing Trump back to office, the newly vocal Silicon Valley right expects a bonanza of industry and “innovation”-friendly de-regulation — and they are celebrating it, very publicly. “It’s time to build ����Renaissance,” tweeted Shaun Maguire, the prolifically Trumpy Sequoia Capital partner, invoking a longtime catchphrase on the venture-capital right. Marc Andreessen, a major Trump donor, summed it up succinctly on X: “FUCK yes. The romance of production is back.” Behind the chest-thumping is a real, if not yet completely defined, new style of Republican politics emphasizing state capacity, industrial policy, and closer ties between Silicon Valley and the federal government. Now, the question is: What do Trump’s tech backers actually get for their support? If you want a laundry list of asks, you can look at the VC giant Andreessen Horowitz’s “American Dynamism” project, which emphasizes a mixture of deregulation and public-private partnerships in fields like defense and education. The “let’s build” crew emphasizes onshoring industrial production, building massive fleets of military drones and getting humanity a foothold in space, all with a laser focus on getting bureaucrats out of the way and letting tech wizards work their magic. On one specific issue — AI — there’s a prospect for major whiplash when Trump takes office again. VCs like Andreessen are rabidly eager to tear down the scaffolding that President Joe Biden’s administration (and many of the firms that have collaborated with him) began constructing around artificial intelligence. “This whole narrative of trust and safety is just over,” a giddy Brian Chau, executive director of the pro-open source AI nonprofit Alliance for the Future, told DFD. “It’s going to be a whole different conversation around quote-unquote ‘AI safety.’” The complex debate over regulating AI has hinged partly on accelerating its development — to compete with China, or to grow the economy, or to create a “post-scarcity” techno-wonderland — and partly on mitigating its risks. Depending on your politics and your feelings about technology, the biggest risks might be reproducing existing human bias, or taking away jobs, or causing human extinction. Chau paraphrased a quasi-viral X post , saying “whatever [driverless car company] Waymo is doing is real AI safety, everything else is just science fiction.” The looming presence of Elon Musk might complicate this a bit. Despite owning an AI platform himself, he has argued in favor of regulating AI, citing potential risk to humanity. But he’s actually against regulating it for bias: Musk has publicly stated that “an AI… programmed to push for diversity at all costs” could literally kill people. With Trump and Musk ascendant, that means developers who want to loosen the reins on AI development will likely find common cause with their shared hatred of perceived nanny-like Big Tech companies and nonprofits. The deregulation push could expand to unexpected areas. Although Trump has tried to distance himself from Operation Warp Speed , the massive, successful push during his first term to rapidly develop a Covid-19 vaccine, in many ways it’s the perfect example of the kind of laissez-faire partnership between the government and industry for which the “American Dynamism” crowd clamors. “I'm looking forward to the Trump administration doing a major deregulatory push at FDA,” Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, told DFD. He cited a favorable post-Chevron legal landscape, arguing that a second Trump administration could “unleash a torrent of venture-backed medical innovation.” (He speculated that the influence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vehement critic of the biotech industry, would be “circumscribed.”) The “let’s build” crowd might, however, find that cutting through red tape and unleashing the “romance of production” in Washington, even with Elon Musk attached to the White House, is slightly more difficult than it is in Silicon Valley. Putting aside the basic challenges posed by the regulatory state (the shrinking of which will supposedly be Musk’s ambit), there’s the simple fact that a Trump White House will have competing power centers, just like the first time around. For example: Andreessen Horowitz’s Katherine Boyle praised JD Vance in a post on X this morning, but he’s one of the most vocal fans on the right of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, arguably Silicon Valley’s biggest foe. And Trump’s mercurial political instincts will inevitably scramble positions on issues like the potential ban of TikTok, which Andreessen has criticized as a security threat but Trump has opposed banning. Trump has also recently disparaged the CHIPS and Science Act , Washington’s own bipartisan nod to the “let’s build” ethos. Alliance for the Future’s Chau downplayed these tensions, however, arguing that the wave of good feelings and desire to cut through red tape — and Democratic norms, shared by many major corporations, about speech and safety — accompanying the Trump-Musk ascendance will smooth over most turbulence. “I don't think you're going to see a broad CHIPS repeal,” Chau said. “I don’t think it’s realistic … there are a lot of people who support Trump, who are excited for more onshoring more domestic production, who want more things to be made in America, and maybe would not give a public endorsement of the CHIPS Act, but are ideologically supportive of it.”
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