AI Earthquake Threat Creates Growing Political Discord in Silicon Valley

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Election season is always a good time to take the political temperature in the tech world, and this year it certainly looks like Silicon Valley — a traditional bastion of Democratic support — is moving to the right.

Loud voices like Elon Musk have led a vociferous campaign against the president, and as Financial Times colleagues in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., recently noted, the pro-Trump faction in the tech world certainly seems larger and louder this election cycle than it did in 2020 or 2016.

But the hype coming from Silicon Valley makes it easy to read too much into this. I suspect I’m not the only one who sees Elon Musk’s ramblings at the top of the page whenever I look at X. (I also suspect I’m not the only one who goes there less frequently—whatever your political views. Who has the emotional energy to generate that much hate and trolling?)

In fact, there has always been a deep tension between the very liberal social beliefs of most Northern California tech workers and the strong libertarian streak that has always been evident among tech founders. The interesting question is where that balance lies at any given moment.

In some ways, the tech world has begun to move further to the left. According to OpenSecrets, roughly 70-80% of political donations from people in sectors like software and the internet now flow to Democrats. It wasn’t always that high, but things have moved further to the left since Trump came on the scene.

But it’s a different story with tech leaders. There has long been a complaint on the right that tech bosses are subservient to liberal labor, increasing the anti-Republican bias on their platforms. That claim has softened as worker activism has declined. These days, most tech leaders tell their workers to leave their personal passions—political or otherwise—at home when they come to work, as the Financial Times’s Ellen Moore points out here.

At the same time, liberalism has become more pronounced. It has become socially acceptable for people to lean toward Trump—or at least, open warfare on platforms like X has provided an outlet for people to express opinions they might previously have kept to themselves.

The rise of generative AI has raised the stakes dramatically. Many in Silicon Valley believe the rest of the world is underestimating how important it is to the economy, politics, and pretty much everything else. That has put them in particular alignment with the incoming U.S. administration, which many believe will play a major role in shaping the future of technology at a pivotal moment.

The status quo suits many. While the relationship has been strained at times, the Big Tech establishment has reached some sort of accommodation with the Biden administration, suggesting that it would be more than happy to keep the Democrats in the White House (regardless of whether Biden himself resides in the White House).

Tech companies have been direct beneficiaries of some of Biden’s key legislative successes, such as the CHIPS Act and increased funding for infrastructure, and last year’s executive order on artificial intelligence was broadly supported by big tech companies.

But there were certainly some sharp differences of opinion, especially on the antitrust activity of the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department. The prospect of the Trump administration weakening antitrust watchdogs is clearly appealing to some, like this former Google lobbyist who bragged on LinkedIn.

If the current tech establishment generally feels it can coexist with Democrats in the White House, there is a strong sense of opposition. According to this view, if AI is a pivotal moment for technology, freeing it from excessive regulation on the one hand, and the inhibiting grip of big tech on the other, is of paramount importance.

This group’s views are most clearly reflected in firms like Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm co-founded by Marc Andreessen, a libertarian, which recently announced that it will, for the first time, start supporting politicians whose views it agrees with. Andreessen’s latest contribution to the debate is a plea on behalf of “small tech”—startups that are supposedly being stifled by excessive regulation. This is supposedly a nonpartisan position, but there are no prizes for guessing what changes Andreessen would like to see in Washington.

I feel like these views have a broader following in Silicon Valley. Hannah, you've been following Musk for a while and you're watching this from San Francisco, what do you think of the loudest liberal voices?

Suggested Reading

In politics, a passion for a bare-knuckle fight can seem like a sign of strength, but sometimes it can seem frivolous and counterproductive. That’s the situation Joe Biden finds himself in as he tries to maintain his grip on the Democratic presidential nomination. Either he shows energy and determination, or he stubbornly refuses to accept reality. This New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof sums up the predicament Democrats face.

To get a sense of how fast AI is advancing, the article “Situational Awareness” by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner is worth reading. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom laid out the theoretical risks posed by advanced AI a decade ago in his book Superintelligence . Aschenbrenner reframes this view with a detailed analysis of all the ways in which AI is getting closer to achieving what Bostrom envisioned. There are still hurdles, and truly superintelligent machines may prove to be an impossible fantasy, at least given the current state of AI knowledge, but it illustrates how quickly the field is moving.

There is a growing gap between the massive amount of money the tech industry has spent building generative AI infrastructure and the additional revenue it generates. This article by David Kahn, a partner at Sequoia Capital, sums it up: A $600 billion gap that could swallow many of the AI ​​industry’s dreams.

Hannah Murphy responds

Richard

Over the past few years, Musk and Trump have become naturally aligned on a shared sense of victimhood—both have been targeted by “labor”—and have pushed for a new vision of American “free speech.” As part of this, Musk, who has become increasingly enamored with Trump’s rhetoric, has used his own platform to galvanize those with secret conservative desires to speak out. And, as you can tell, many of them are now coming out of the woodwork.

But are Trump’s new supporters really focused on what the presidential candidate is currently promising Silicon Valley—or what he might deliver? Some argue that some tech leaders are simply vying for influence in Trump’s court now that his campaign is gaining credible momentum. With Trump and his transactional approach, these leaders are spying on ways to shape policy directly by lending influence or money.

Trump, however, appears open for business. He has recently made grand promises to boost the deep-pocketed cryptocurrency industry, positioning himself as its savior from Biden-hostile SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. And just this week, it emerged that the former president — who tweeted in 2019 that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were “built on air” — is planning to speak at a bitcoin conference in Nashville later this month.

On your point about AI, we’re already starting to see this tension play out at the state level. My colleague Tabby Kinder and I recently wrote about the hastily passed AI safety legislation in the California Senate, to the horror of tech innovators and venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz, who see it as stifling. Supporters of the legislation (whom critics call AI pessimists) say they moved so quickly because they feared the Trump administration would ignore AI safety or even reverse Biden’s executive order.

If Trump's embrace of the crypto sector is any precedent, we may see AI companies get even louder.

Your comments

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