a16z投资欺诈性AI产品并游说放松监管

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Andreessen Horowitz is shaping AI policy — while investing in a bleak vision of the future

The firm’s investment portfolio is full of companies that have exploited legal loopholes, created disturbing products, and broken the law.

By

Tyler Johnston

-

Jan 8, 2026

No headings found

Marc Andreessen wants to shape US AI policy. The venture capital firm he co-founded and runs, Andreessen Horowitz (abbreviated “a16z”), is a major player in the development of new tech startups.

These startups include:

• A bot farm of fake accounts, tricking people and social media platforms into thinking AI-generated ads are posted by real people
• An AI company that wants to normalize cheating on dates, job interviews, and tests with AI
• AI companion apps linked to suicide and disturbing behavior toward children
• A platform hosting thousands of deepfake models — 96% targeting identifiable women — that have been used to create AI-generated content sexualizing children
• Gambling platforms that attempt to subvert existing laws and target vulnerable users
• Fintech companies implicated in fraud and illegality

Many of these companies knew the rules and broke them anyway — or designed products specifically to exploit gaps in consumer protection. The firms profited, and the public paid the costs.

There’s a growing public desire to rein in tech companies and regulate AI, so a16z is spending tens of millions of dollars to shape the development of AI policy. The firm helped launch a $100 million super PAC, saw former partners take key government roles, and successfully pushed for an executive order attempting to undermine state AI laws. The partners want to set the rules of the road, even as they’re already driving recklessly.

What follows is The Midas Project's survey of 18 of Andreessen Horowitz's most notorious investments. This isn’t a comprehensive overview of the firm’s larger portfolio, but it indicates a pattern of behavior — one comprising hundreds of millions of dollars of investment by a16z.

These investments reveal the lines that a16z is willing to cross and how the lax regulatory environment that they favor would benefit the firm’s bottom line.

A16z did not respond to a request to comment for this report.

Deception and manipulation

A16z has invested in products designed for mass deception. Even if these tactics don’t explicitly violate the law, they can be corrosive to society.

As technology like advanced AI improves — making it much easier to fake almost anything — decision makers may want to enact new laws or policies that mitigate the social costs. And if a16z gets its way, we might never update the rulebook.

Doublespeed

A16z invested $1 million in October 2025 via Speedrun.

Doublespeed sells the capacity to trick everyday people, and social media platforms themselves, into thinking AI-generated ads are genuine human content. Here are some select quotes from the company’s promotional video:

• “We run the only VC-backed bot farm in America. Because why let Russia and China have all the fun?”
• “We didn't break the internet. It was broken to begin with. But now we're killing it entirely.”
• “Welcome to the dead internet.”

A16z's Speedrun program invested $1 million in Doublespeed, a company that was recently covered in a blistering article by 404 Media, which reported: “Andreessen Horowitz is funding a company that clearly violates the inauthentic behavior policies of every major social media platform.”

Excerpts from Doublespeed’s website

The company’s business model relies on deception, designed to make social media platforms and their users believe AI-generated images and videos depict real people.

How do they do this? By selling access to “phone farms” that create and manage thousands of fake social media accounts to manipulate engagement metrics. The company's website is explicit, saying its product “mimics” the behavior of real people on social media in order to “get our content to appear human to the algorithms.”

“Yes, we built a phone farm (and its pretty sick),” said Doublespeed founder Zuhair Lakhani on X. The purpose was “replacing human creators with ai, mainly used for marketing.”

A photo of Doublespeed’s phone farms, shared by the founder Zuhair Lakhani on X.

They use thousands of real phones to pull this off because social media platforms like TikTok have policies against and methods to detect the mass generation and deployment of fake accounts.

The company has the accounts imitate human behavior before posting deceptive content. This means the fake accounts search specific keywords, scroll their “For You” pages, and use AI to analyze screenshots of content to determine whether to “repost it, comment on it” or “swipe away.”

A feed of AI-generated marketing content created by Doublespeed. Source: Superwall on YouTube

A selection of nearly identical Doublespeed-run TikTok accounts. Most posts involve the AI decoy complaining about any one of a number of medical issues. Then, the account lists a handful of cures, including a foam roller product from Doublespeed’s client. Source: Tiktok, Doublespeed on loom

This is all designed to circumvent platforms’ restrictions on fake content and then serve that fake content to unsuspecting real people.

In a podcast interview, Lakhani offered details about one of the company’s clients: “They're hitting like the old person niche, which is what I think is like the best niche to hit with AI content.”

Polling and research have found that older people are less likely to say they’ve heard about AI and more likely to fall for AI-generated misinformation.

Lakhani drew a parallel between this client and his prior work producing AI-generated marketing content at scale: “It was all like old person niche stuff. So like all supplements that would, you know, target old people, and that's when the commission would go crazy.”

“Those brands would tell you to do like, you know, make some like extremely crazy claims,” he said, “especially with supplements.” Lakhani added, “The supplement stuff should definitely be like kind of illegal. I don't know how that is allowed.”

Despite their founder stating that supplement ads should be illegal, Doublespeed isn’t shying away from them. In December 2025, a hacker gained access to Doublespeed’s entire backend and the leaked data showed what the AI-generated “influencers” were actually selling.

One account, “pattyluvslife,” featured an AI-generated woman claiming to be a UCLA student. The account criticized the supplement industry and pharmaceutical companies as fraudulent — while simultaneously promoting a herbal supplement from a brand called Rosabella.

Another account under the name “chloedav1s_” had uploaded some 200 posts featuring an AI-generated woman claiming to suffer from various health conditions and often pictured in a hospital bed. She ultimately promoted a specific company’s foam roller as a solution to her ailments.

A tweet from DoubleSpeed’s founder shows one of the company’s bot accounts messaging a user to promote the product. In the post, Lakhani boasted, “A couple of weeks ago, we gave the [AI] agents access to dm … This was for an ecommerce brand - out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.”

Another image from Doublespeed’s platform showing their bot account, imitating a human and messaging users with medical conditions to promote the client’s foam roller product. Source: Zuhair Lakhani on X.