THE HILL & VALLEY FORUM began three years ago as a dinner party. In March 2023, a small group of venture capitalists and lawmakers gathered in Washington ahead of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew's congressional testimony, united mostly by a shared conviction that China posed a technological threat the American government was not taking seriously enough. Founded by Jacob Helberg, then a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, alongside VCs Christian Garrett and Delian Asparouhov, the consortium also counted Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla among its early participants. On Monday, its third annual convening filled a Washington ballroom with Jamie Dimon, the COO of OpenAI, the CTO of Palantir, NASA's administrator, Taiwan's vice president, the Speaker of the House, and senators from both parties. Its organizers say the forum now exceeds even the World Economic Forum and the Munich Security Conference in the number of sitting members of Congress it attracts.
The forum's rapid ascent from Beltway dinner to premier tech-policy convening tracks a broader shift. Bloomberg, previewing this year's event, framed it as a test of Silicon Valley's alliance with the Trump administration, set against growing public anxiety over AI's economic disruption and its deployment in the Iran conflict. But what actually unfolded on Monday was less a test than a victory lap. Session after session, from Foxconn chairman Young Liu on AI supply chains to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar on competing with China's defense model, delivered variations on a single thesis: the United States must build faster, regulate less, and treat technological supremacy as a matter of national survival. The applause lines wrote themselves. Speaker Mike Johnson, delivering the afternoon keynote, called for a single national AI framework, full R&D expensing, and energy permitting reform across gas, oil, nuclear, and coal. Congress, he urged, must move "at the speed of victory."
Abandoned posts
Yet the day's most bracing moment came not from a lawmaker but from Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens, who turned the forum's own optimism against itself. In a session titled "Broken Bureaucracies vs. The Tyranny of Technologists," Stephens delivered a blunt indictment of four decades of American governance failure. Immigration reform commands 70 to 80 percent public support, he noted, and has gone nowhere. Trillions have been spent on infrastructure without producing a single fully operational chips fab. The federal government, in his telling, "has abandoned its post." And Silicon Valley was not spared: the industry's past resistance to Pentagon work, epitomized by the Google revolt against Project Maven, amounted to a gift wrapped for Beijing. "There is no moral neutrality in that decision," Stephens said, framing the old tech-sector squeamishness about defense contracts as a strategic abdication in the face of what he called the "high-tech arsenal of autocracy."
The critique landed because it identified the forum's central paradox. The Washington Post's dispatch from the morning sessions noted that China hawks emphasized shoring up AI supply chains while flagging that Iran had deliberately targeted AI investments in Persian Gulf states, a reminder that geopolitical competition is accelerating even as Washington's legislative machinery grinds slowly. Rep. John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, stressed the need for stronger export controls and allied coordination, but acknowledged the uncomfortable dependency at the heart of the rivalry: unlike the Cold War, where the U.S. and the Soviet Union operated largely separate economies, America remains deeply reliant on its chief competitor for critical minerals, manufacturing capacity, and supply chain inputs. "We have to stop enabling them to continue to defeat us on this," he said, a formulation that implicitly concedes just how far that enabling has already gone.
The forum's answer to this paradox is, essentially, acceleration. More capital, more permitting reform, more public-private partnerships, fewer procedural barriers. Sessions on nuclear energy for AI data centers, on commercial space (NASA administrator Jared Isaacman discussing the transition from government programs to a private-sector space economy), and on biotech supply chains as geopolitical leverage all pointed in the same direction: the United States needs an industrial policy that moves at startup speed. Helberg, who now serves as Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, embodies the forum's theory of change, a co-founder who crossed from the Valley to the State Department, bringing the accelerationist gospel with him.
The connective tissue problem
Whether that gospel translates into legislation is another matter. The bipartisan participation was real; Senators Cantwell, Coons, Warner, and Young shared stages with Republican colleagues Banks and Scott. But bipartisan attendance is not the same as bipartisan lawmaking. Stephens's litany of multi-decade legislative failures (immigration, healthcare, infrastructure) remains stubbornly relevant; the question is whether AI exceptionalism, the idea that this technology is urgent enough to override normal congressional dysfunction, can produce results where other urgent priorities have not. The forum's 2024 convening featured Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer on the same stage, and yet no comprehensive federal AI legislation has materialized in the intervening two years.
Still, something has clearly shifted. The old fault line between a pacifist Valley and a hawkish Pentagon has largely collapsed; the companies that once balked at defense contracts now compete for them, and the VCs who once avoided classified briefings now attend forums where export controls are discussed with the enthusiasm once reserved for Series A term sheets. The Hill & Valley Forum is both a symptom of that realignment and an engine of it, a place where the connective tissue between technologists and policymakers thickens by the year. Whether that tissue can bear the weight of actual industrial transformation, or whether it remains a convening of people who agree with each other splendidly, is the question the forum has not yet answered. The next 250 years, as they say, will tell. ■
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