Marc Andreessen publishes the 'Techno-Optimist Manifesto'

Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen published a long essay arguing that technology, combined with free markets, is the only durable source of human progress, and that a “demoralization campaign” against that idea had taken hold across institutions, media and academia. Artificial intelligence featured centrally: Andreessen called it “a universal problem solver” that could save lives and expand what he termed “the techno-capital machine,” a self-reinforcing cycle of technological and economic advance.

The essay closed with an explicit list of “enemies” — not people, Andreessen wrote, but ideas — naming existential risk, the precautionary principle, sustainability, ESG, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, stakeholder capitalism, social responsibility, tech ethics, trust and safety, risk management, “de-growth” and “the limits of growth.” Grouping AI-safety-adjacent concepts alongside corporate ESG frameworks and environmental sustainability was itself an argument: that concern about AI risk belonged to the same family of institutional caution Andreessen believed had throttled other technologies.

The manifesto drew wide notice for its bluntness rather than its underlying philosophy, which extended arguments Andreessen and others had made for years about regulation and innovation. Critics read the explicit enemies list as a marked escalation — an open declaration against the AI-safety field rather than a disagreement over specific policy — and as evidence that Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capital voice had aligned firmly against the precautionary approach many AI researchers, including some at OpenAI and Anthropic, had spent the prior year publicly advocating.

The essay became a foundational text for the “effective accelerationist,” or e/acc, movement that had been forming online through 2023 as a counter-current to AI-safety discourse, giving that loose online tendency an institutional voice with real capital behind it. It sharpened, rather than resolved, the argument the industry was already having over how much caution frontier AI development warranted — a debate that continued through the following years’ policy fights over state and federal AI regulation.