O'Driscoll: Protecting AI Frontier Models Harms Economy by Raising Intelligence Costs
Rory O'Driscoll · Coinbase Cuts AI Spend by 50% | Kalshi's $40B Valuation & Impending IPO | The Year for SaaS Roll-Ups · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 2, 2026 · at 29:16
Rory O'Driscoll (General Partner at Scale) explains the economic downsides of using trade restrictions to protect US AI model makers from foreign open-source competition.
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“Because what you're saying is keep up the price of AI as an input to the rest of the economy by protecting, protecting these foundation models pricing structure so that they can get a trillion dollars in revenue. And the loser, as always is the case with trade restrictions, is the rest of the economy who won't get cheap intelligence. They'll get dear intelligence.”
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