Ann argues that national deterrence has shifted from being about military scale to being about how fast a country and its private sector can innovate against cheap, software-driven threats. ✦ AI generated
Ann · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-03 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 5:48
“How much of your decision to join a16z was motivated by this mission and also the sense of duty and helping other countries think about the adoption to AI and not wanting to get left behind in AI?”
deterrence is no longer just the size of a military. I think as we see in the straight of Hermuz or we saw in the Red Sea, it's the pace of innovation in reacting to cheap softwarebuilt tech that adversaries may be using whether they're a country, criminal or a terrorist group. And those technologies today are not being built by governments. They're being built by the private sector.
verbatim transcript · starts at 5:48
5:48water systems. >> Yeah. So I saw that shift happen from tech being either an IT issue or just a tool to the central arena of both economic growth and national power. And quite frankly the from a deterrence perspective which is the language we talk about between countries in terms of deterring an invasion of a country maintaining an international system of stability. You know deterrence is no longer just the size of a military. I
6:15think as we see in the straight of Hermuz or we saw in the Red Sea, it's the pace of innovation in reacting to cheap softwarebuilt tech that adversaries may be using whether they're a country, criminal or a terrorist group. >> Yep. >> And those technologies today are not being built by governments. They're being built by the private sector. Whether that's AI systems, whether that's autonomous systems, whether
6:38that's cyber defense systems, they are being built on in the private sector. So certainly from a US perspective ensuring that we have the relationships between government and private sector to leverage that for our own economic growth and as a force for good on the world stage but also that our allies as well we build together we fight together and to ensure that together we can both have the advantages of that and to the
7:01extent that our tech also represents our values >> it's important that the world run on America and on western tech. Yeah, actually that's a great point on the values point because Ben you've said before no country also wants to get colonized >> in cyerspace right particularly because AI is now just getting built in the six block radius >> in San Francisco um say say a little bit
7:23more about that >> well you know when AI becomes the interface for everything um so every every tool we have every technology we use every kind of system we have from your car to your refrigerator to your education system is going to be built on these models and the models um are not objective. They have opinions um and they they have strong opinions on things like history,