Regulation AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-19

A law written in 1914 is being pointed at the way venture capital has always worked

The Justice Department has spent nearly a year investigating Andreessen Horowitz over the board seats its partners hold at two competing data companies, according to reports published on 17 and 18 August. Co-founder Ben Horowitz sits on the board of Databricks; partner Martin Casado is a director at Fivetran. Both sell enterprises the machinery for collecting, organising and analysing large amounts of data, which is the raw material for the AI systems those enterprises are building. Section 8 of the Clayton Act, passed in 1914, bars one person from sitting on the boards of two competing companies, on the reasoning that a firm is less likely to fight a rival it shares a boardroom with. The novel question is whether that ban reaches a venture firm represented by two different partners rather than one individual wearing two hats. No enforcement decision has been made, and the investigation is proceeding despite the firm's close ties to the current administration.

Why it mattersOverlapping board seats are not an edge case in venture capital, they are the model: a fund takes stakes across a sector precisely because it cannot know which company wins, and its partners sit in the rooms to protect those stakes. If the Justice Department decides that a firm counts as one person for the purposes of a 112-year-old statute, the standard partnership structure becomes a legal exposure across the entire industry, not just at this one firm. For AI specifically, that matters because a handful of funds sit inside most of the companies competing in each layer of the stack — models, data, tooling — and know what each is planning.

✓ Verified · 4 sources

Read in the app — free, in 9 languages

A law written in 1914 is being pointed at the way venture capital has always worked

Related stories