Does America Deserve to Win the AI Race? Erik Voorhees Says No: Uneasy Money

Summary

Venice AI founder Erik Voorhees argues that crypto is better financial infrastructure for the coming wave of AI agents and should serve products rather than become the product. He explains why Venice sold equity but kept VVV tokens, why AI inference is becoming a commodity race to zero, and why he distrusts top-down AI moderation and US AI nationalism. The hosts also discuss open-weight models, local inference, and token versus equity alignment.

• Stripe buying OpenRouter is framed as a crypto-to-AI pivot; Venice is presented as a true crypto-plus-AI intersection.
• Voorhees argues tokens should coordinate and serve real products, not be the product themselves, and he is negative on memecoins.
• Venice sold equity instead of VVV tokens and plans to make the token deflationary through buybacks/burns.
• He sees crypto rails as the natural payment and coordination layer for AI agents.
• Open-weight models are compressing inference costs, and he views AI inference as a commodity race to zero.
• He is critical of Anthropic and OpenAI for losing money on subsidized plans and for placing an opaque moderation layer over models.
• Voorhees rejects AI nationalism, saying America should not win by default and that decentralization is the safer path.