This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
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REID:
The models that OpenAI and Anthropic have internally are a lot better than the ones that are currently deployed. And so seeing what the future of this looks like and how it operates is important.
Most of the people who tend to lead in government tend to be older, and older tends to be, by definition, you know, almost way out of date.
My hope, as opposed to my fear—it’s the dual mandate: how do we deploy AI? So both America continues to lead the world in artificial intelligence, making it American intelligence.
But though I think my American intelligence is better than Trump’s superintelligence.
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REID:
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ARIA:
Reid, so lovely to be here in person with you for this episode of Reid Riffs.
REID:
And it’s great that it’s in Silicon Valley here in the Greylock offices.
ARIA:
Absolutely. Silicon Valley. My second favorite place after New York. So as we head into the midterms, no surprise, there are several competing ideas about what we should do with AI, how we should legislate it. So we have Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar, and they want to ban superintelligence altogether. And they want to pause advanced AI development until we can have federal guidelines. Then we also have a bipartisan push from Chris Murphy, Democrat Chris Murphy, and Republican Josh Hawley, and they have proposed holding AI developers responsible if their AIs are the ones doing the hacking. Then we have the president. Trump has been sending mixed signals. He wants to call it superintelligence. He called it a hoax. It’s unclear at best where he stands, I would say.
So looking ahead to 2027, we’re going to have a, you know, new Congress, a new Senate. What do you think the political coalitions around AI are going to look like?
REID:
So, unfortunately, the naturally most aggressive coalitions are essentially probably anti-AI, therefore anti the future, anti American intelligence, et cetera. And I think one of the things we all need to work on is to say, no, it should be AI as American intelligence, AI as things that are helping America. And so, like, a pause or a stop is a terrible idea, because it’s like, no, no, we should be shaping it in this direction. It’s like, oh, no, no, we’re only pausing or stopping it so that we can run a congressional process to figure out what it is. And if you kind of—okay, running a congressional process to make anything in technology potentially work at all, work better, not be a catastrophic outcome.
Running it through the congressional process would strike me as, like, you know, maybe almost the worst possible thing you could do. So, and then similarly, look, I do think that figuring out kind of accountability and accountability laws is an important thing. And we have this thing, like, right now, like, if you look at just kind of the Hugging Face incidents and say, well, what’s—what’s a what? Where does accountability lie here? It’s almost like, well, that’s weird, because it’s almost like product liability or something, because it’s coming out of a product. It’s the only kind of legal category we have for that right now. But it’s like, okay, so where should the AI model developer, where should the AI model user, where should the user as an organization, where should the individual—
How does it relate to prompting? How does it relate to the AI agent itself? And where is all this? We’re going to just really need to rethink this. And I think that the right place to start is to say, hey, we should commission some smart work about thinking about what that should be now. It should be a dynamic framework for evolving. Because I think that the, you know—as, you know, one of the things I think about AI-native organizations is they’re building for the anticipation of AIs of the future, which is hard for everyone, even for technologists, especially hard for non-technologists. But it’s the path we’re on. It’s like things are changing.
Like, one of the things that I think people are not really taking as the right kind of generalization from, like, OpenAI’s release of the math proofs is the models that OpenAI and Anthropic have internally are a lot better than the ones that are currently deployed. And so seeing what kind of the future of this looks like and how it operates is important. My hope, as opposed to my fear, would be that the coalitions would be, how do we deploy—it’s the dual mandate, how do we deploy AI? So both America continues to lead the world in artificial intelligence, making it American intelligence. But—but though I think my American intelligence is better than Trump’s superintelligence, you know, as a—as a kind of a vector.
And, you know, the 60-plus percent of people who are struggling in, you know, this economy and Trump’s economy, whether it’s oil prices or anything else, like, it’s helping them too. And it’s not, wait, oh, in a number of years it’ll get to you. It’s—it’s as closely linked as possible in developing that. And that’s what I would want coalitions around. Now, for decoding what Trump might actually sign into law, I think there are probably two parts to that decoding. One is, I think that the administration is kind of robustly in competition with China. So something that was oriented in winning at China is, I think, a good path. And then the other is, you know, you kind of look at a lot of the administration’s actions, and it’s either grifters or clowns.
And, you know, so, you know, maybe, like, you know, parts of it can be bought. I mean, we—we saw the ambassador to Greece, you know, is—is one explicit. But, you know, there’s also Freedom Coin. Maybe if you buy a certain amount of Freedom Coin, that will—that will enable a certain kind of AI regulatory framework, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, like, if you say, what will Trump sign? You know, if it’s not competition with China, maybe it’s something in those arenas.
ARIA:
Right. Not going to be what we want. Well, so, I mean, sort of bipartisan work is seemingly more and more impossible, but you could imagine that a sort of wing of the progressive Democrats get together with the populist Republicans as the ones to oppose AI. Could you see a similar scramble with some Republicans coming together in a bipartisan way with Democrats to promote—not necessarily unfettered pro-AI, but sort of pro-AI, pro-business, pro-economics? Like, is that even possible?
REID:
I think that’s fairly unlikely, unfortunately, because I think that if you look at every action that Trump has taken over his political career, it’s divisive versus unitary, like he’s never said. And so it’s very hard for more than, call it, you know, one or two or three brave Republicans to break from the pack, because they know that Trump will go really intensive, because he doesn’t want any collaboration across the aisle. He’s not—he doesn’t care about collaboration for the betterment of American society. He wants to only have, you know, people following himself.
ARIA:
Right, right, absolutely.
REID:
And so I think that the coalition to—to kind of—kind of American intelligence, I think, will be hard to—to make work.
ARIA:
He won’t want to give Democrats any wins. He’ll want to stop it. Again, like you said, he’ll only sign something if there’s some grift in it for him or his family or—
REID:
And that was part of the reason I was saying maybe the geopolitics. Maybe geopolitics and the China competition.
ARIA:
Right. So that’s the government side of things. But obviously the labs are also stepping up and have their own ideas, both because they need to protect their businesses, but also we believe they genuinely care about what the outcomes are here. And they want to make sure that AI is best poised for the future. And so Reuters reported this week that Anthropic has been privately pitching lawmakers on its own frontier AI safety bill. And they posited that frontier models would undergo independent evaluations. Evaluators have to report imminent risks in 72 hours. But they also proposed sort of some safeguards that define the limits of regulators’ authority.
They said that suspending a model would require the Commerce Department to seek a federal judge’s approval, with thresholds involving imminent risks of more than a billion dollars in damage or more than 50 deaths. And so Anthropic has also committed $40 million to Public First Action. But they said that those donations are restricted to public education and policy advocacy, and they cannot fund election activity. Meanwhile, you saw there was a lot of talk about Greg Brockman and Leading the Future. There are a lot of people at OpenAI who were upset with that donation. They were saying this undermines the work that OpenAI is trying to do. And so recently, both OpenAI and Greg Brockman have sort of walked back those donations, and they aren’t as involved.
You’ve spent a lot of time in this world, the intersection of technology and government, and sort of previously, I feel like, you know, the technology world sort of left government alone, but now it is so intertwined that it’s clear that these companies want to have a voice in Washington. How do you think these AI companies, specifically the frontier labs, Anthropic, OpenAI, should engage with government?
REID:
Right now there’s a whole set of things. So obviously, as is, you know, kind of what I earlier said, that, you know, the Trump administration is a combination of—of grifters and clowns. You know, for example, take the insanity of the Iranian war and what it’s doing for America and global oil prices.
ARIA:
I think they posited that the average American family will have to spend an extra $2,000 this year because—
REID:
So—so just a kind of a—a set of different things there. Now, that being said, I think it’s really important that—that the kind of all-scale tech companies work with the American governments, you know, in all of their institutions. Because I think that that’s actually, in fact, it’s working for the American people. So I think that the tendency where people say, oh, we’re really frustrated, we run around it—you know, whether it’s a red, blue, purple, whatever government, I think it’s very important to work with governments. Now, obviously, the line that you have to navigate here is this kind of question of working for the people, not working for your industrial interest.
Part of what I think is good about what, for example, the Anthropic proposal is doing—I think OpenAI is motivated the same way—is they’re trying to figure out how. They may have different theories about how AI is good for America, but it’s the how do we enable that kind of American intelligence? How do we enable that kind of—of—of pro-society basis? Now, classically there’s—there’s, unfortunately, over time economic interests tend to do regulatory capture, they tend to do other kinds of things as ways of doing this. And we really need to try to limit that, avoid that, et cetera. But being in the dialogue really matters.
I mean, it’s apparent to everybody who, you know, has, you know, any attention whatsoever that AI is going to be a massive impact on society, on work, on industries, on geopolitics, on national defense. And so having people involved and expert and—and—and articulating what’s possible. And, you know, when you look at, for example, Anthropic and OpenAI, they’re not just, you know, kind of saying, hey, here’s all the things that can be good. They’re also saying, here’s some of the things that we think are dangerous to navigate, and are trying to make that happen.
And so, for example, I think that the Anthropic proposal of saying, hey, this is a good thing to have some, you know, regulatory predictability on, but let’s go through the rule-of-law system versus kind of, you know, autocratic, you know, kind of whimsical things from, you know, kind of any administration, including this one, I think is actually a good effort and sketch of this. So I think that being involved is good. Now, you know, classically a lot of the, you know, kind of more lefty progressives think, you know, industry involvement whatsoever can only lead to bad. And—and the thing that they don’t track is that part of what makes, I think, all democracies work is a true pluralism, right?
Like, you actually have to have, you know, experts, not just from academia, but also from industry involved. And, by the way, industry saying, we know what’s what—some of the things that are going on—and so we can argue that is a good thing. Now, spending money is one of the things you have to be, I think, transparent about. One of the things I think you have to be public about in terms of what you’re doing. And I think that, you know, part of when you say both, you know, the kind of public education Anthropic is doing and also the shift from OpenAI, I think that’s a response to transparent, open things where they’re getting public pressure, both from the public and from their employees.
And I think that’s part of the reason why the transparency is important, because it’s shifting around kind of the way that you slot into that humanist, pro-American future. And I think that’s what’s really important.
ARIA:
What do you think we’re going to need to do to get—you’re talking about, we need the partnership between government and industry, because this is how we make innovation happen. But the government right now doesn’t have the expertise. How do we solve for that? Is it more elected officials who have that background? Is it getting some folks who used to be at Anthropic or OpenAI to go into government? Like, how do we build up that government’s expertise? Or is that just impossible because the economics on the other side are just too great?
REID:
So I think government will trail massively industrial expertise for a couple of strategic—couple of structural reasons.
ARIA:
Why?
REID:
One structural reason is that the people who tend to go into government are not the people who—like, you only learn this from being in industry. And, like, very, very few people shift from industry, and not just from economic bases. It’s just, like, hey, I’m leading a successful career, starting companies, you know, investing in things, et cetera. And then there’s, like—to do that is very, very hard to get. And there are a lot of antibodies. And so there tends to be a kind of—go, go into it. So that’s one. Another one is most of the people who tend to lead in government tend to be older. And older tends to be, by definition, you know, almost way out of date, technically not on the cutting edge, right?
So—and even when you get, you know, smart people like Mark Warner or, you know, Gina Raimondo and so forth, they have to—they have to bring in other folks to consult on that. So that’s the reason why I tend to think it’s—it’s—it’s—it’s how do you assemble the essentially working groups? Like, how do you have NGO groups? How do you have, you know, councils, advisors? How do you have—like, for example, you know, part of the reason why, like, the Presidential Council on Science and Technology is so—is so important is, like, and how do you make more of those—those organizations work?
And then, you know, like, for example, you know, it’s like, I think you have to include a strong industrial participation, but then you try to include that strong industrial participation in ways that is transparent about, you know, economic interests, is transparent about, you know, kind of contribution, and is also, like, selected to have people who go, look, I might, like, be working at Company X, but, you know, I’m, like, sitting here amongst a council of other people, and there are other folks of industry—not just even, like, perhaps competitors to my company, but other companies as well—and then a set of other people. And then you can kind of reason to—to good outcomes. And I think that’s what you’re essentially looking for. And I think all of the kind of Western democracy governments need to do that now.
It’s great if more technologists, technology experts—you know, I tend to think that, you know, one of the things that probably, like, part of the thing I’ve—I’ve supported in various ways is, you know, Stanford and Harvard have various ways that they try to educate both congresspeople and staffers on things, whether it’s cybersecurity—you know, Condoleezza Rice does a great job with the Spogli Institute and a bunch of other folks here—or, you know, Jennifer Lerner at Harvard does decision-making and, you know, the science of decision-making.
I think obviously some of those things for technology, and in particular for, like, technology broadly, but also, you know, AI technology, I think, will be very important to—to make happen, because even though they won’t become experts, even just, like, getting informed about what the basic concepts are and how fast it’s evolving is very important.
ARIA:
I mean, I think we saw in the Obama administration a lot of people in Silicon Valley were called to serve. You know, we obviously are good friends with DJ Patil, who said, no, I have to go serve this government. And I think in ’28, if we have candidates who have that inspiration, innovation, friendship with Silicon Valley, we’ll be able to see more technologists called to serve and sort of be experts in AI with the future.
REID:
And just so people aren’t too alarmed, actually, just connectivity.
ARIA:
Yeah, right.
REID:
It doesn’t have to be friendship. It’s just, like, channels of communication and discussion. It doesn’t have to be, like, an alliance of any sort, as much as there’s a lot there that can be leveraged to the American people’s benefit. So make sure that’s happening. Even if part of the role might be to, you know, to make sure that, you know, certain companies or certain industries are accountable to some interests that they may not otherwise be, naturally, given the market doing it all.
ARIA:
All right. So shifting gears away from politics and government, one—one piece of a growing debate we’re seeing is sort of the open versus closed debate happening. And specifically in the business community, you have a lot of companies that aren’t frontier labs. They don’t have their own models, but increasingly a huge portion of their company relies on these models working well. And so when you have a company that is so reliant on an external provider, like, how do you make sure that, one, you’re retaining IP—that these models that are coming into your company have the security, have the safeguards? I mean, Satya Nadella recently argued that companies should treat both closed and open-weight models as potential insider risks. And he said that businesses need to control their own permissions.
They need to monitor actions and independently verify the results throughout these systems. And in his words, we need to separate the supply of intelligence from the authority over it. This is going to be an increasing question for all companies, but specifically big companies in the Fortune 500 that are relying on Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, et cetera. So how should these companies think about their own sovereignty as it relates to their partnerships with the frontier labs?
REID:
Well, not surprising, since I’m still on the Microsoft board and Satya and I, you know, talk regularly, I’m a strong endorser of Satya’s, you know, kind of, call it, lens—you know, attention focus on this as a key issue. And obviously I think that the question is to say, well, how do we maintain the integrity of our intelligence, of our capabilities, et cetera? And we don’t want to treat, you know, kind of the quasi-new AI agentic employees as a bleed of could-be business intelligence. You could imagine the kind of worst parts of this might be, does it bleed to the stock market and kind of insider trading? Does it bleed to competitors that then know things? Does it bleed to suppliers that then know that they can hold you over a, you know, a barrel, et cetera?
So there are real reasons. It’s not just kind of, like, a cybersecurity or a ransom hacking thing. There are, like, real reasons why that IP really matters on all these fronts. And so the question is, you know, where can you trust the provisioning of these models? In addition to—I think that he’s right that the right way is to kind of build frameworks that, you know, can be harnesses or agentic frameworks and things that, you know, have, you know, independent validation—by the company and by the company’s auditors—of what things are happening, which is very complex to do with models. It’s one of the reasons why you tend to abstract from models. And, like, even with an open-weights model, you don’t really know what’s fully going on there.
And so treating it as, like, well, we’re running the model on our premises, doesn’t necessarily mean that it has those things. So that—so that attention to how do you maintain that integrity of intellectual property, you know, kind of company-internal secret, you know, trade secret data and processes, I think, is really important. Now, I do think that one of the things that will also be a way of doing this is, do you trust the model provider?
ARIA:
Absolutely.
REID:
Right. And so I think that in cases of companies like Microsoft, which have had decades of, our first thing is each individual customer. And so people say, well, why does Microsoft’s product sometimes trail? And it’s because, it’s like, well, it’s because we are first and foremost making sure that this is for our corporate customers in terms of doing that. And that can be an important way of—of—of navigating that. I think there’s also, like—one of the things I think will happen, is happening already, but will happen more, is that companies will get specifically post-trained models for them. Like, I think, you know, a number of different companies—but, like, you get a—okay, I get a post-trained model for me. I trust the model provider.
Not just the model that the company may have just built for everybody, but also built a model for me, and there’s a contract for it. So I think there’s a broader range than just the harnesses and control. I think the strategic goal is exactly right, as Satya says. But I think that there will be an evolving range of how to navigate toward that strategic goal.
ARIA:
All right. Thinking about the new world of business with AI, it feels like there were perhaps unwritten rules in the past that when you’re a VC, you don’t invest in competitors. If you’re in Uber, you don’t invest in Lyft. You have to make sure that you’re—and feel free to disagree with the premise. But at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, Benchmark partners said that AI companies’ rapid expansion is making these conflicts between investments increasingly difficult to avoid. There was an explosion of activity on X recently about a public dispute between Factory and Cognition over an advisor who moved from one company to another. They raised concerns: Is that advisor taking confidential information? Vinod Khosla jumped in, and he publicly sided against Factory, even though his firm backs both companies.
He called Factory a struggling second-tier competitor and accused its CEO of having no decency or sense of proper behavior. So these are some fighting words. You’ve been a founder, you’ve been an investor. What’s your take? Can you back competitors? Is it increasingly difficult in the AI world? How should investors parse that?
REID:
I think it is increasingly difficult in the AI world to keep channels of potential competitive conflict. First, AI companies evolve fast in different directions. Second, they evolve very expansively. Third, AI agents’ broad capabilities themselves, as they empower these things, mean that you can grow into spaces.
ARIA:
Sure.
REID:
Fourth, seeking what are the most important strategic assets, whether it’s data or other things or coding capabilities—that’ll draw a lot of AI companies into similar kinds of zones. In short, I think the increasing competition within these is inevitable. So what does that mean as an investor? What I think that means is investors say, look, you still need to navigate with integrity.
ARIA:
Yes.
REID:
Which means don’t bleed information between companies of any sort—even the questions or the struggles or other kinds of things they’re doing. Make sure that companies are aware of where you might have conflicts, either as an individual or as a firm, and say, hey, you know, just to be aware.
We’re also an investor in Cognition, or we’re also an investor in Factory, as a kind of way of navigating. And, you know, the questions around—you know, I think for employees, or for anyone who is a member of company one, if you’re going to company two, you have to be—you have to be extra careful and clear and transparent about how you’re not taking any company IP. Now, the hardest ones are, there’s all this, like, water cooler conversation that isn’t, like—it’s not like taking a model or taking a data source, but it’s like, hey, I’ve got this clever idea that’s kind of more like tradecraft in how one might construct better coding, or—or what kinds of people are constructing coding in kind of interesting ways. And—and, like, that’s not—that’s not, like, collectible IP.
And I may have thought about it. Now, I won’t—I shouldn’t sit down and say, hey, company two, let me tell you what company one is doing. But it will inform how I think, and that’s part of how people evolve. And you have to have some expectation that that will happen. But you try to be as transparent about it as possible. And, for example, if I’m at company one and another person had this idea, I don’t go say, oh, I have an idea for you, because it wasn’t my idea. And—and I don’t try to push people toward it. But obviously, as I’m thinking about it, I might come up with my own version, or different, and I might say, hey, I’ve got an idea. And that’s kind of the nature of how humans operate.
ARIA:
I mean, that’s one of the reasons Silicon Valley has been successful.
REID:
Exactly.
ARIA:
But if you’re a founder and you find out that one of your investors—or they tell you, to your point, transparency—that they’ve invested in a competitor, does that change what you as a founder will share with that investor, with the board, et cetera?
REID:
Well, ideally, you have a close enough relationship with that investor that you have high trust in the walls of integrity. If you don’t, then, for example, something I’ve helped founders do sometimes is say, well, I want a different partner from the firm. I want to limit certain kinds of information that I’m sharing. You have to have that integrity of the boardroom. And so I think it’s possible. I do this myself. I’ve been on companies where there are conflicting lines, and what you want to be is—you want to have such a depth of relationship, people are like, I have 100% confidence that there is zero bleed in either direction. And I think that’s what’s important to operate. And then, by the way, that’s the kind of investors and board members founders should seek.
ARIA:
I was about to say, there’s probably a bigger problem with that board member if you don’t have the trust in them, if you’re questioning them anyway, if you feel like you can’t have those open conversations. Reid, delighted to be here with you today.
REID:
Pleasure.
ARIA:
If you enjoyed this conversation, follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and consider leaving us a review. It really does help audiences find us.
REID:
Possible is produced by Palette Media. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Thanasi Dilos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Yimu Xiu, Aman Suri, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nemarundwe.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles.