The artificial intelligence gold rush is creating a new ideological battlefront in Silicon Valley. Tech founders and engineers are being branded “missionaries” or “mercenaries”, depending on whether they claim to be developing AI to advance the interests of America and humanity; or whether they are using AI to serve the next upgrade of the consumer internet with products like video-sharing apps and computer-generated influencers.

Deedy Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, told me Silicon Valley has turned increasingly mercenary in the AI boom as “very passionate nerds” lose ground to people who primarily want to “make a lot of money”.

“It’s the new Wall Street,” he said. “It’s a way to make a lot of money. And I think over the course of time, what that does to missionaries and mercenaries, is you organically have way more mercenaries. I mean, even just being a founder today, for most young people, is more a status symbol than it is a mission … it’s a resumé item. It’s the new Harvard Business School.”

The head of another Silicon Valley venture capital firm told me the super-salaries of AI engineers spearheaded by Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg has been offering pay packages valued at as much as $200 million, had created a “mercenary hysteria”.

He said: “It’s one thing to be a missionary. It’s another thing to be a missionary and feel like you could be making $100 million if you weren’t.”

Meta’s superintelligence team has been accused by tech leaders of accepting big pay packages to produce “AI slop”. Last month, when Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, unveiled Vibes, an app feature that allows users to create and scroll through a feed of AI-generated videos, Nikita Bier, head of product at X, commented: “Give me the slop stream.”

Jake Cooper, founder of Railway, a San Francisco-based software infrastructure platform, wrote that Vibes is “not the future I would like to live in”. He added: “AI can and should be used for good. A partner in craft, allowing us to move faster to go farther. It can also be used for evil. To hook you an infinite IV of cheap crap. Let’s choose the former please.”

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While investors worry that the elevated expenses of tech companies with their heady valuations will end in a crash, savvy tech leaders are concerned about the broader public perception of AI technology amid a growing backlash to energy-guzzling data centres and the potential for AI to cause severe disruption to the jobs market.

The gloves are coming off. Commenting on Meta’s Vibes feature, Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir Technologies, the software and data analytics company that works with the US military, wrote on X: “Frivolous applications of AI do nothing to address the greatest challenges of our time and adds more weight to the growing anti-AI movement which sees America’s AI companies as disinterested in their fate, exploitative, and craven.”

President Trump’s administration has so far favoured low regulation of AI firms. The White House AI plan, published in July, sets out how the president is relying on AI to usher in a “new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people”.

The pro-innovation advocates for low regulation presently have the upper hand. However, that could quickly change, along with the US administration’s approach towards AI regulation, if rapid technological advances lead to public unrest.

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It is challenging to classify AI companies as missionary or mercenary, as there are plenty of founders who want to solve important problems while becoming very rich, and there are plenty of AI companies with lofty mission statements that are mercenary.

That isn’t stopping tech luminaries from stepping in as adjudicators of the “good guys” and “bad guys” in the AI race, however.

Reid Hoffman, the AI investor and co-founder of LinkedIn, claimed on Monday that Anthropic was “one of the good guys”, and along with Microsoft, Google and OpenAI, is “trying to deploy AI the right way, thoughtfully, safely, and enormously beneficial for society”. Anthropic has been accused by White House AI tsar David Sacks of leading a “regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering”.

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Hoffman commented: “Some other labs are making decisions that clearly disregard safety and societal impact (e.g. bots that sometimes go full-fascist) and that’s a choice.”

Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta, the venture capital firm, told me: “California has always had this mix of dreamers and dollar hunters, and it’s tricky to separate them out.

“I’m hesitant to point to good guys and bad guys, because we all have everything within us. As for which is which, it’s only obvious in retrospect.”