Podcasts

with ICE + Casey Tries Clawdbot, a Risky New A.I. Assistant + HatGPT

This week we’re talking about the tech industry’s response to the killings by federal agents in Minneapolis and the federal government’s strategy to control the narrative on social media. Then we follow Casey through his trial of a new open-source A.I. assistant called Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) and consider whether it is worth the security risk. And, finally, it’s time for a look at the rest of the week’s tech news with a round of HatGPT. Additional Reading: False Posts and Altered Images Distort Views of Minnesota Shooting A Moment-by-Moment Look at the Shooting of Alex Pretti It’s a War: Inside ICE’s Media Machine Some Amazon Employees Get ‘Project Dawn’ Calendar Invitation Discussing Upcoming Job Cuts TikTok Data Center Outage Triggers Trust Crisis for New U.S. Owners Former FTX Crypto Executive Caroline Ellison Released From Federal Custody Anthropic C.E.O.’s Grave Warning: A.I. Will “Test Us as a Species” Inside the White House Screening for Amazon’s ‘Melania’ Doc App for Quitti

Netlify's CEO, Matt Biilmann, reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year's rate—and 96% aren't coming from AI coding tools. They're everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then discovering they need somewhere to deploy them. The addressable market for developer tools just exploded from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion spreadsheet users, but only if your product speaks fluent AI—which is why Netlify's founder now submits pull requests he built entirely through prompting, never touching code himself, and why 25% of users immediately copy error messages to LLMs instead of debugging manually. The web isn't dying to agents; it's being reborn by them, with CEOs coding again and non-developers shipping production apps while the entire economics of software—from perpetual licenses to subscriptions to pure usage—gets rewritten in real-time. Resources: Follow Matt Biilmann on X: https://x.com/biilmann Follow Martin

Recently, Marc Andreessen joined Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Podcast. They talked about why 2025 may be the most significant year in tech history, how AI is reshaping the future of product managers, designers, and engineers, and what founders need to understand about building in this moment—from where moats actually exist in AI to what the most AI-native companies are doing differently to the skills Marc is teaching his own kids to thrive in what comes next. Resources: Follow Marc Andreessen on X: https://twitter.com/pmarca Follow Lenny Rachitsky on X: https://twitter.com/lennysan Check out Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/podcast Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https

Can a country be built from the internet up? Not as a metaphor or an online community, but as a system that replaces institutions we usually think of as fixed, money, law, and governance. In this conversation taken from The Network State Podcast, a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz joins Balaji Srinivasan to explore how internet native institutions are beginning to mirror and challenge traditional state structures. Drawing parallels to China’s early special economic zones, they discuss how constrained experiments like Shenzhen tested new rules without rewriting the entire system, and why similar experimentation is now happening online. The discussion examines crypto, digital identity, and network states as attempts to turn code into coordination and coordination into legitimacy, while grappling with a core tension. Code is deterministic, but societies are not. Ben and Balaji explore where these systems work, where they break, and whether network states are a curiosity or the next phase of gove

Out-of-Pocket is a healthcare education company founded by Nikhil Krishnan that helps people understand how healthcare works and how to navigate it in practice. In this episode, a16z investing partner Jay Rughani and Nikhil discuss why health insurance is losing its role as the default way people access care. They explain how rising costs are pushing more consumers to pay out of pocket for diagnostics, preventive care, and navigation. The conversation also looks at what this shift means for startups, AI-powered tools, regulation, and access as healthcare continues to move beyond insurance. Resources: Follow Jay Rughani on X: https://twitter.com/JayRughani Follow Nikhil Krishnan on X: https://twitter.com/nikillinit Read Out of Pocket’s 2026 Predictions: https://www.outofpocket.health/p/out-of-pockets-2026-predictions Stay Updated: Find a16z on X Find a16z on LinkedIn Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts Please note that the content here is for inf

In this episode, Jen Kha, Head of Investor Relations, and David George, General Partner, discuss how late-stage private markets are evolving as AI reshapes scale, capital intensity, and growth timelines. They explain why AI-driven companies are staying private longer, how infrastructure spending is changing return profiles, and what this moment means for durability, value creation, and long-term outcomes in private markets. Timecodes: 0:00 — Introduction 04:21 — The Market Opportunity for AI 26:48 — Pricing, Monetization, and Cash Burn 43:15 — Companies Staying Private Longer 51:30 — Portfolio Composition and Construction 57:18 — Team Culture and Collaboration Resources: Follow Jen Kha on X: https://x.com/jkhamehl Follow David George on X: https://x.com/DavidGeorge83 Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Podcast

Mintlify is a documentation platform built by cofounders Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee to help teams create and maintain developer docs. In this episode, Andreessen Horowitz general partners Jennifer Li and Yoko Li speak with Han and Hahnbee about how coding agents are changing what “good docs” mean, shifting documentation from a human-only resource into infrastructure that powers AI tools, support agents, and internal knowledge workflows. They share Mintlify’s early journey, including eight pivots, the two-day prototype that landed their first customer, and the “do things that don’t scale” sales motion that helped them win early traction. The conversation also covers why docs go out of date, what “self-healing” documentation requires to actually work, and how serving fast-moving customers has shaped both their product priorities and their pace. Follow Jennifer Li on X: https://twitter.com/JenniferHli Follow Yoko Li on X: https://twitter.com/stuffyokodraws Follow Han Wang on X: https://twit

Ads are coming to ChatGPT’s free and low-cost subscription tiers. We explain what they’ll look like, why OpenAI is taking this approach and whether the company can court advertising dollars without compromising quality and user trust. Then, Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher in charge of shaping Claude’s personality, joins us to discuss the company’s newly released “Claude Constitution” and what it takes to teach a chatbot to be good. As a bonus, if you’re interested in learning how to get started with Claude Code, you can check out our tutorial on YouTube. Guest: Amanda Askell, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff Additional Reading: OpenAI Starts Testing Ads in ChatGPT Claude’s Constitution Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.c

Inferact is a new AI infrastructure company founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM. Its mission is to build a universal, open-source inference layer that makes large AI models faster, cheaper, and more reliable to run across any hardware, model architecture, or deployment environment. Together, they broke down how modern AI models are actually run in production, why “inference” has quietly become one of the hardest problems in AI infrastructure, and how the open-source project vLLM emerged to solve it. The conversation also looked at why the vLLM team started Inferact and their vision for a universal inference layer that can run any model, on any chip, efficiently. Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://twitter.com/BornsteinMatt Follow Simon Mo on X: https://twitter.com/simon_mo_ Follow Woosuk Kwon on X: https://twitter.com/woosuk_k Follow vLLM on X: https://twitter.com/vllm_project Stay Updated: Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube Find a16z on X Find a16z on LinkedIn Listen to th

In this feed drop from The Six Five Pod, a16z General Partner Martin Casado discusses how AI is changing infrastructure, software, and enterprise purchasing. He explains why current constraints are driven less by technical limits and more by regulation, particularly around power, data centers, and compute expansion. The episode also covers how AI is affecting software development, lowering the barrier to coding without eliminating the need for experienced engineers, and how agent-driven tools may shift infrastructure decision-making away from humans. Watch more from Six Five Media: https://www.youtube.com/@SixFiveMedia Resources: Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado Follow Patrick Moorhead on X: https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead Follow Daniel Newman on X: https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://w

with CTO Beyang Liu

Sourcegraph's CTO just revealed why 90% of his code now comes from agents—and why the Chinese models powering America's AI future should terrify Washington. While Silicon Valley obsesses over AGI apocalypse scenarios, Beyang Liu's team discovered something darker: every competitive open-source coding model they tested traces back to Chinese labs, and US companies have gone silent after releasing Llama 3. The regulatory fear that killed American open-source development isn't hypothetical anymore—it's already handed the infrastructure layer of the AI revolution to Beijing, one fine-tuned model at a time. Resources: Follow Beyang Liu on X: https://x.com/beyang Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado Follow Guido Appenzeller on X: https://x.com/appenz Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Podcast on S

To Regulate AI Effectively, Focus on How It’s Used A conversation with Martin Casado on learning from past computing platform shifts, understanding marginal risk in AI, and why open source matters for US competitiveness. One of the core pillars of our roadmap for federal AI legislation makes clear AI should not excuse wrongdoing. When people or companies use AI to break the law, existing criminal, civil rights, consumer protection, and antitrust frameworks should still apply. Enforcement agencies should have the resources they need to enforce the law. If existing bodies of law fall short in accounting for certain AI use cases, any new laws should be evidence-based, clearly defining marginal risks and the optimal approach to target harms directly. In this conversation, we go deeper on what that principle means in practice with Martin Casado, general partner at a16z where he leads the firm’s infrastructure practice and invests in advanced AI systems and foundational compute. Martin has l

The a16z AI Apps team outlines how they are thinking about the AI application cycle and why they believe it represents the largest and fastest product shift in software to date. The conversation places AI in the context of prior platform waves, from PCs to cloud to mobile, and examines where adoption is already translating into real enterprise usage and revenue. They walk through three core investment themes: existing software categories becoming AI-native, new categories where software directly replaces labor, and applications built around proprietary data and closed-loop workflows. Using portfolio examples, the discussion shows how these models play out in practice and why defensibility, workflow ownership, and data moats matter more than novelty as AI applications scale. Resources: Follow Alex Rampell on X: https://twitter.com/arampell Follow Jen Kha on X: https://twitter.com/jkhamehl Follow David Haber on X: https://twitter.com/dhaber Follow Anish Acharya on X: https://twitter.com/

This week, Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Anxious Generation,” returns to the show to discuss new research about how social media is harming teens and what it’s been like to become the face of a global movement against the platforms. Then, we asked what you were building with Claude Code, and you blew us away. We’ll share some of our favorite projects that you sent us. And finally, we’re joined by PJ Vogt, the host of “Search Engine,” to talk about our early adventures in the Forkiverse and what we’ve learned so far about running a social media network. Guests: Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation" PJ Vogt, host of “Search Engine” Additional Reading: Mountains of Evidence Meta’s Internal Research An NYT Event in LA - Trump: The First Year of His Second Term We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscrib

Paul Rosolie is a naturalist, explorer, author of a new book titled Junglekeeper, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest. https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep489-sc Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/paul-rosolie-3-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: https://amzn.to/4q7vpAp https://instagram.com/paulrosolie https://junglekeepers.org https://paulrosolie.com https://amzn.to/3ww2ob1 SPONSORS: Perplexity: AI-powered answer engine. https://perplexity.ai/ BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. https://betterhelp.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. https://drinkLMNT.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. https://shopify.com/lex Fin: AI agent for customer service. https://fin.ai/lex Miro: Onl

Over the past year we’ve been working with the podcast “Search Engine” on a project that reimagines what the internet can be. What if instead of rage-baiting, a social platform incentivized friendly interaction and good faith discussion? Today we’re bringing “Hard Fork” listeners an episode we made with the “Search Engine” team called “The Fediverse Experiment” where we end up creating our own social media platform. Guest: PJ Vogt, host of the podcast “Search Engine.” Additional Reading: The Dream of the Fediverse Is Alive on Threads What Is Mastodon and Why Are People Leaving Twitter for It? We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by

When four MIT grads decided to build a code editor while everyone else was building AI agents, they created the fastest-growing developer tool ever built. Cursor CEO Michael Truell joins a16z’s Martin Casado to discuss the deliberate constraints that led to breakthroughs: why they rejected the "democratization" narrative to focus on power users, how their 2-day work trials test for agency over credentials, and the strategic decision to own the editor when conventional wisdom said it was impossible. Follow Michael on X: https://x.com/mntruell Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Check out

In this episode, we sit down with David Kuo, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Point2 Technology, to explore the company’s radical approach to breaking the data center “copper cliff.” From RF-over-plastic waveguides to ultra-efficient retimers, Point2 is challenging a decade of assumptions about how AI clusters should be wired, and what’s possible when you rethink the link itself. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to IE+ for premium insights and exclusive content!

Users of X are asking the platform’s built-in A.I. chatbot, Grok, to remove clothing from images of celebrities and everyday people. We talk with the New York Times reporter Kate Conger about how some of the targets of this sexual harassment, including children and their families, are responding, and whether anyone will take action to stop it. Then, we recap a holiday break spent experimenting with Claude Code. We unveil what we built, how we did it and why the tool’s dramatic improvement could be scary for society. And finally, Casey debunks a viral Reddit post that accuses the food delivery industry of shocking exploitation. We explain how a scammer tried to fool us all using AI-generated evidence. Guests: Kate Conger, New York Times tech reporter covering X. Additional Reading: Elon Musk’s A.I. Is Generating Sexualized Images of Real People, Fueling Outrage Debunking the A.I. Food Delivery Hoax That Fooled Reddit We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Find “Hard

Nvidia’s $5 billion investment in Intel is one of the biggest surprises in semiconductors in years. Two longtime rivals are now teaming up, and the ripple effects could reshape AI, cloud, and the global chip race. To make sense of it all, Erik Torenberg is joined by Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, joins Sarah Wang, general partner at a16z, and Guido Appenzeller, a16z partner and former CTO of Intel’s Data Center and AI business unit. Together, they dig into what the deal means for Nvidia, Intel, AMD, ARM, and Huawei; the state of US-China tech bans; Nvidia’s moat and Jensen Huang’s leadership; and the future of GPUs, mega data centers, and AI infrastructure. Resources: Find Dylan on X: https://x.com/dylan522p Find Sarah on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwang Find Guido on X: https://x.com/appenz Learn more about SemiAnalysis: https://semianalysis.com/dylan-patel/ Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts