A16z Board Seats Under a DOJ Interlock Probe That Is Now Nearly 12 Months Old

The number is the age of the file: roughly twelve months. Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter, that the Justice Department has a nearly year-old antitrust investigation into whether Andreessen Horowitz partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies, an inquiry not previously reported that was opened around the same time as a merger review and has continued after that deal closed ^[1][7].

What the probe turns on is who sits where. The companies at issue include Databricks and Fivetran, both backed by the firm; co-founder Ben Horowitz is on the Databricks board and partner Martin Casado is a Fivetran director, and both businesses help customers collect, organize and analyze large volumes of data ^[2][3][4]. Casado also sat on the board of dbt labs, which Fivetran acquired in June ^[5]. The department ran a months-long review of that transaction, first announced in October, and cleared it unconditionally ^[6]. So the deal review, running roughly eight months from announcement to close, has already ended; the board-seat inquiry that began with it has not ^[14].

That asymmetry is the point. Section 8 of the Clayton Act, codified at 15 U.S.C. 19 and titled "Interlocking directorates and officers," was rewritten in 1990 to lift the jurisdictional threshold to $10 million in net worth, create three de minimis exceptions for insignificant competitive overlaps, and extend coverage to officers chosen by the board ^[10][11]. Resolution is usually cheap and structural rather than punitive: directors step down from one of the competing boards, as they did on some dozen boards, including Live Nation, under the Biden administration ^[9].

The political overlay is unusual. The firm has aligned itself closely with the second Trump administration and has pressed for minimal regulation that its portfolio would benefit from ^[12]; Horowitz and Marc Andreessen each gave millions in 2024 to a Trump-aligned group, and Horowitz later gave $2.5 million to a pro-Harris super PAC ^[13].

Watch for resignations from either the Databricks or Fivetran board, which is what closure normally looks like. Spokespeople for Databricks and the Justice Department declined to comment, and Andreessen Horowitz and Fivetran did not respond to requests for comment ^[8].