Lightspeed welcomes the Administration’s AI Action Plan — it represents a decisive step toward preserving American AI leadership at a critical geopolitical moment. As we’ve argued before in Defending American AI Leadership: DeepSeek is a Distraction, Not a Disruptor, U.S. frontier labs benefit from unparalleled access to talent, capital, and infrastructure — foundational strengths that demand both protection and bold support. The result is an environment that accelerates innovation.
As our founder Ravi Mhatre notes:
“In AI, you either own the frontier or get commoditized. The AI Action Plan helps ensure that America continues to build by streamlining regulation, identifying opportunities for AI to scale, and getting more energy online. It will help ensure America owns the future of AI while others still try to catch up to what we built yesterday.”
At Lightspeed, we see this as more than a policy milestone, it’s a catalyst for progress. The greatest opportunity now lies in accelerating the development of foundation models alongside the infrastructure and application layers that will extend intelligence into new domains. As investors, we are committed to advancing both the technical core of AI and the applications that bring its capabilities to life. Our focus is on scaling these breakthroughs into industries critical to U.S. economic growth and independence-including financial services, professional services, healthcare, robotics, and defense.
A uniform national framework that avoids a fragmented, state-by-state patchwork that will likely lead to regulatory capture by incumbent technology companies is essential to sustaining the United States’ advantages. As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team recently argued in their policy recommendations, America must build out the critical AI infrastructure required to develop AGI ahead of competing nations like China. By streamlining regulation, identifying R&D priorities, and reinforcing common AI standards, while ensuring the federal coordination necessary for maintaining technological leadership, this plan positions the U.S. to continue its innovation dominance in the AI era.
We also appreciate the plan’s infrastructure vision. AI scale hinges on reliable, abundant energy, which means scaling today’s technologies to meet demand in the short term while funding tomorrow’s technologies that would represent true energy breakthroughs. Lightspeed has backed next-generation energy firms: Base Power, whose battery storage technology could help scale vital short-term energy capacity, and fusion energy companies Helion and Pacific Fusion that could deliver the gigawatts to power the frontiers of AI and national competitiveness in the decades to come.
AI is a foundational technology-the ultimate horizontal. Use cases as varied as AI-powered coding, professional services, self-driving cars, and robotics are rapidly scaling; we expect the growing use of AI agents and novel scientific discoveries to follow.
Our investment thesis seeks to unlock value from each part of this technology supercycle. That begins with the foundation model builders at the frontier: companies like Anthropic, Mistral, Thinking Machines, xAI creating entirely new capabilities from AI. It includes the infrastructure builders scaling those capabilities, such as Databricks and Snorkel. And it includes pathbreaking businesses applying AI into hugely valuable markets like the enterprise (Glean, Moveworks), defense (Anduril, Helsing), and health (Abridge, Neko).
But the landscape in which these companies are building is getting more complex. Policy changes are compounding as geopolitical competition intensifies; capital requirements are getting bigger; value is staying private. The AI Action Plan provides greater clarity for companies to navigate these shifts and capitalize on AI’s opportunities. We look forward to working with policymakers and innovators to continue to ensure the U.S. remains the global standard-bearer in AI.
The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. The views expressed here are those of the individual Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. (“Lightspeed”) personnel and are not the views of Lightspeed or its affiliates; other market participants could take different views.
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