In Washington, Silicon Valley’s Iconoclasts Cheer an America-First Consensus
Techno-optimism and anti-China rhetoric dominated the Hill and Valley Forum
After years of cool, sometimes hostile relations between the tech sector and the federal government, the once-fringe Silicon Valley cohort that got behind Trump now wields outsized power in Washington — and is leading the charge on the need to beat China at advanced weaponry and AI, and to reinvest in American industrial power.
The new dynamic was on clear display at the annual Hill and Valley Forum — the largest and arguably most successful that cohosts Jacob Helberg, Delian Asparouhov, and Christian Garrett have put on these past four years — which had all the trappings of an early victory lap for the China hawks and defense boosters in Silicon Valley.
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“We’ve made the 2021 counter-culture the 2025 mainstream culture,” Helberg said in opening the event, and his own ascent in Washington personifies this change. The former Palantir advisor and chief lobbyist for the Congressional TikTok ban is now awaiting confirmation as President Trump’s Undersecretary of State for Energy, Growth, and the Environment.
Leaders from OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as their investors, voiced support for much of the America-first vision, even if it no longer includes lip-service to AI safety concerns that those companies once prioritized. “I don’t want the best open weights model to be a Chinese model,” said OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil.
“I think the most proficient and efficient artificial intelligence needs to be built with American democratic values,” said Thrive Capital’s Joshua Kushner. “And if it’s not, I think the consequences are going to be quite extraordinary for the Western world.”
One of the few tech leaders who has taken a different view on China, Benchmark’s Bill Gurley, wasn’t in attendance, but was the target of a jab on the issue — from a former nemesis.
Undersecretary of Defense Emil Michael, once a top executive at Uber before being pushed out, sat on a panel alongside Asparouhov, Weil, and Google’s Ruth Porat. He took a not so subtle dig at Benchmark’s reported decision to back the Chinese startup Manus AI: “It’s not like there’s not a plethora of US companies doing AI to invest in that are high quality.”
Backing a Chinese AI startup is suddenly the most contrarian action an investor could take.