Steven Sinofsky is a former president of Microsoft's Windows division, a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and the author of the Hardcore Software newsletter on the history and practice of the software industry.
Positions on AI policy
In a July 22, 2026 essay ("Distillation Is Not Anti-American, Weaponizing It Is"), Sinofsky argued that the Trump administration's push against Chinese distillation of US frontier models is "regulatory capture," writing that treating distillation as intellectual-property theft "is somewhat rich when you consider how [labs] acquired their training data" (Source: hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com). The essay responded to OSTP Director Michael Kratsios's accusation that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's Fable model, and to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's statement that distillation sanctions were on the table.
Relationships
- contradicts: the administration's anti-distillation enforcement posture; see Distillation, Adversarial Distillation.
- related: Regulatory Capture in AI Policy, Microsoft.