‘Startup Nation’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’

“There's so much capital and there's so much political will, but yet there's an inability to develop these technologies,” says Allen. “And the inability comes from lack of space and too many regulations.”

But Gil Duran, a former political consultant and author of the Substack newsletter Nerd Reich, warns that building new cities from scratch could have negative consequences. “To be outside of the law and above the law, what does that mean for the rest of the country?” he asks. “It seems like you're going to start hollowing out other places in order to have these places where the rules are suspended and don't apply anymore to certain people.”

Goff says that unlike Próspera, which has an entirely different tax structure from surrounding Honduras, freedom cities in the US would likely pay a similar amount in state and federal taxes as other American cities. The main difference would be how the cities are regulated.

American Dynamism

One company that stands to benefit from the rise of freedom cities is Minicircle, a longevity biotech company focused on developing gene therapies to extend human lifespans. The company’s seed funding came from Thiel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and it currently has offices in both Austin, Texas, and Próspera. Minicircle cofounder Mac Davis is also working with the Frontier Foundation.

Davis says that Minicircle’s gene therapy clinical trial on the protein follistatin—which he claims increases muscle mass without side effects, and also has life-extending benefits in mice—was only possible in Próspera, but noted he’d like to see that change.

“I'd like a ‘longevity city’ where everyone and their dog is on gene therapy,” Davis says.

Davis adds that he can imagine many other companies benefiting from freedom cities, including SpaceX, the defense hardware and software company Anduril, and Oklo, a nuclear fission startup chaired by Sam Altman.

Many of the industries Allen says he hopes to foster in Freedom Cities–energy, nuclear, semiconductors, and defense technology–are, not coincidentally, ones “a lot of venture [capital] is going

towards” as funding moves away from SaaS, digital, and internet consumer brands.

“The theme is American Dynamism,” he says, referencing the 2022 manifesto from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which argues that “the scientific and operational excellence of consequential technology companies made up for the shortfall of our flailing governmental institutions.” Since 2021, venture capitalists have plowed more than $100 billion into defense tech startups alone.

Some tech companies have been considering revitalizing nuclear power in order to sustain AI data centers, which use a huge amount of energy. Amazon signed several nuclear power agreements last year, Google made a deal with a nuclear power company in October 2024, and Meta is asking for proposals on how the company can leverage nuclear power.

Goff tells WIRED that he thinks freedom cities could also be used as manufacturing hubs and shipbuilding ports, allowing builders to bypass the environmental review process. Mason says the American Enterprise Institute, which is partnering with the Frontier Foundation and Charter Cities Institute, is eager to find ways to use freedom cities to increase housing.

Mason says he’s most excited about speeding up innovation in sectors like biotech and using nuclear power to power AI data centers.

“There's a lot of exciting opportunities here, especially as we need a lot of data centers,” Mason says. “There's a lot of land that you can tap.”

But Duran says that the same deregulation that could be seen as pro-business will likely not favor those outside Freedom Cities’ ultrawealthy backers. “These are going to be cities without democracy,” he claims. “These are going to be cities without workers' rights. These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power. That's what's so attractive about these sovereign entities to these people, is that they will actually be anti-freedom cities.”