Silicon Valley went to Washington and found consensus

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."