Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen (born 1971) co-authored Mosaic, the browser that opened the web to the world, co-founded Netscape, and in 2009 co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture firms. Having declared in 2011 that “software is eating the world,” he spent the 2020s arguing that AI is the next — and biggest — course.

The techno-optimist case

In June 2023 he published “Why AI Will Save the World,” a long essay arguing that AI is a way to make everything we care about better, and that the backlash against it is a classic moral panic — irrational hysteria inflated from legitimate concern. Four months later came “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a roughly 5,000-word credo declaring intelligence the ultimate engine of progress and naming “tech ethics” and “risk management” among the enemies of progress.

The manifesto’s most quoted line held that deaths preventable by an AI that regulation stopped from existing amount to a form of murder. Critics across the spectrum called the vision utopian, self-serving for a firm with billions invested in AI, and dismissive of real harms; Fortune noted its imagined future of 50 billion humans settling other planets. Andreessen was unmoved, and his opposition to AI regulation became overtly political — he cited proposed AI rules as a key reason for backing Donald Trump in 2024, and a16z built one of tech’s most aggressive lobbying operations against state and federal AI safety bills.

Agree or not, Andreessen wrote the accelerationist movement’s founding documents. Much of the pro-AI side of this archive argues in vocabulary he coined.