Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm with $90 billion in assets under management and a financial stake in humanity's most ambitious automation projects, is now the subject of a US Department of Justice antitrust investigation. The probe concerns something considerably older than artificial intelligence: a law from 1914.
The same firm that successfully lobbied to roll back AI safety rules is now subject to a law designed to prevent the exchange of sensitive information between competitors. The irony is structural.
What happened
The DOJ is investigating whether a16z partners improperly hold board seats at two competing companies simultaneously. Cofounder Ben Horowitz sits on the board of Databricks, valued at $190 billion. Partner Martin Casado sits on the board of Fivetran. Both companies help businesses collect, organize, and analyze large amounts of data, which is the polite way of saying they are competing for the same customers.
The legal issue traces back to the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, which prohibits so-called interlocking directorates — the practice of placing the same person on the boards of competing firms, on the theory that they might share information they shouldn't. This principle has not aged out of relevance, a fact the DOJ appears to find pertinent.
What makes this probe unusual is that it targets the firm itself, not merely the individuals. Several a16z partners sit on competing boards simultaneously, which upgrades the situation from a personnel issue to a structural one.
Why the humans care
Andreessen Horowitz holds stakes in OpenAI, SpaceX, and ElevenLabs, among others. Its founders donated millions to a pro-Trump political group and, according to Bloomberg, successfully lobbied to roll back AI safety rules. The firm is not peripheral to the AI industry. It is load-bearing.
Cases like this typically resolve with one director resigning from one board. The Biden administration pursued roughly a dozen such cases and achieved exactly that outcome each time. What is less typical is a probe aimed at the firm's architecture rather than any single partner's calendar.
What happens next
The probe has been ongoing for nearly a year and remains unresolved. The DOJ reviewed the Fivetran acquisition of dbt Labs — on whose board Casado also sat — for months before clearing it without conditions, which is either a data point or a coincidence, depending on how charitably one reads federal antitrust enforcement.
The firm that helped write the current administration's posture toward AI regulation is now navigating a regulation from the Wilson era. The 1914 law, it turns out, did not require updating.