# Andreessen Group Chat Leak On **July 12, 2025**, The Washington Post published messages that [[Marc Andreessen]] had sent in May and June 2025 to a private WhatsApp group whose members included Trump administration officials, tech investors and academics. Reporter Nitasha Tiku based the story on screenshots and on two members of the chat who spoke anonymously. In the messages Andreessen called Stanford and MIT political lobbying operations, said universities would "pay the price" for diversity policies, and said the [[National Science Foundation]] should get "the bureaucratic death penalty." The leak came less than three months after Semafor described the [[Tech Right Group Chats]] as the place where Silicon Valley's politics are worked out in private. It's the clearest example on the record of what that looks like when government officials are in the room. There's a paradox in the timing. The man who argued that tech leaders needed private chats to speak freely was caught speaking freely in one, to people in power, and deleted many of the messages afterward. ## The chat According to the Post's account, the WhatsApp group was used by Trump officials to discuss artificial-intelligence policy with tech figures and academics. It had been set up in 2023 to connect investors and others interested in open development of AI, and its members held a range of political views. The Post didn't publish a full membership list. ## What Andreessen wrote - On May 3 he wrote that he viewed Stanford and MIT "as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point." - He wrote that over the past decade universities had cut the children of Trump voters out of realistic access to higher education and corporate America, and that "they declared war on 70% of the country and now they're going to pay the price." - He described the mood of his side as "my people are furious and not going to take it anymore," blaming "the insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020." - He called "DEI and immigration" a politically lethal combination, and described universities as "Ground Zero of the counterattack." - He wrote that the National Science Foundation, the main federal funder of university science, should receive "the bureaucratic death penalty." - He complained that Stanford had "forced my wife out" as chair of its Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, which his wife, [[Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen]], founded in 2006, and said the decision would cost the university "something like $5 billion in future donations." She had stopped chairing the center in 2024. The Post reported that Andreessen deleted many of the messages after sending them. Fortune reported that the Post's story drew nearly 5,000 reader comments, overwhelmingly negative. TechCrunch and Fortune followed the Post's report. ## Context and aftermath The messages lined up with what the administration was already doing to universities and science funding. The White House asked Congress to cut the National Science Foundation's budget by 57% for fiscal 2026. Congress refused and funded the agency at $8.75 billion, but new research grants still fell sharply. In an April 2026 piece, The Nation set Andreessen's "bureaucratic death penalty" line beside those cuts. The record doesn't show that his messages caused any particular decision. It does show a leading tech investor and administration adviser urging officials, in private, to punish the institutions he named. ## Why it's on the map - **The group chats reach the government.** This is the documented case of the [[Tech Right Group Chats]] pattern with officials in the room: policy arguments made privately to the people who carry policy out. - **Grievance as policy.** Andreessen mixed a personal complaint about his wife's role at Stanford with calls to punish Stanford, MIT and the NSF. - **"My people."** The messages frame the fight over universities as a tribal conflict between Trump voters and elite institutions, in the words of the man who calls the group chats the upstream of public opinion. - **No record by default.** Deleted messages in a chat with officials raise the same record-keeping problem as [[Hegseth Signalgate]]. ## Connections - [[Marc Andreessen]] · [[Andreessen Horowitz]] · [[Tech Right Group Chats]] - [[National Science Foundation]] · [[DEI]] · [[Washington Post]] - [[Hegseth Signalgate]]