Marc Andreessen and Vinod Khosla are in a fight.

It’s not a playground fight with name calling or lawsuits. But in the world of venture capital, where investors pride themselves on being mature counselors to brilliant-but-impulsive founders, the public dispute that broke out between Andreessen and Khosla over the past few days qualifies as a remarkable rumpus.

In case you missed it: On Saturday, Khosla tweeted comments supporting OpenAI—the $86 billion startup he invested in years ago—and calling Elon Musk’s recent lawsuit against the company a "massive distraction.” Andreessen then chimed in to accuse Khosla of “lobbying to ban open source.” Before long, the two VCs were in a heated back-and-forth, arguing about the existential dangers of AI ("Would you open source the Manhattan Project?" Khosla asked his critic, to which Andreessen responded by tweeting the image of a naked Robert Oppenheimer sitting on a sofa—an image from the 2023 film—as well as the provocation that OpenAI “must be immediately nationalized.”)

Others, including Musk himself, jumped into the fray. And as of Monday evening, the tweets were still flying.

The play-by-play of who's-aligned-with-who and who-said-what-to-whom may have the air of a salacious HBO drama, but, naked Oppenheimer tweets aside, this argument would seem to run deeper than a superficial tussle of big egos. At its core, this is an intellectual, even religious, dispute about open source software versus closed source, and what the future of AI should look like—including, to paraphrase Andreessen, whether AI should ultimately be treated like “nukes” or “math.”

The weird thing is that Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures both own shares in OpenAI—Khosla invested at seed, and a16z has bought shares of OpenAI on the secondary market. These guys are on the same team for this one. Why are they squabbling like this? (And also, don’t these guys have each other’s phone numbers? I don’t know about you, but I would, at some point in this process, have probably moved this discussion offline).

One reason for the public spectacle might simply be that we live in a new world, where Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s wild cage match hype, which peaked with the rumor that they’d fight in Rome’s Colosseum, has become the norm. As much as anything else, Khosla and Andreessen could see this as a useful branding exercise. It wasn’t that long ago that many VC firms didn’t believe in doing PR, and valuations on big deals were kept hush-hush. Today, venture firms are as thirsty and image conscious as their portfolio companies.

A more charitable interpretation might be that the public feud isn’t a craven and self-serving branding exercise, but a reflection of the stakes involved. The debate over AGI, guardrails, and regulation within the AI industry is real. Adherents of the different sides are passionate about their cause, which they consider existential, and are eager to win converts.

And then there’s the most sincere interpretation of all—that these two very powerful men are as anxious as we are, if not more, about the future of AI and are unsure as to how it will be shaped, because it’s far bigger than either of them. And this uncertainty highlights a truth: If AI indeed is the sea change it's generally believed to be, even masters of the universe are worried, as they play what’s likely the most high-stakes game of their lives—and ours.

Elsewhere…Commerce Ventures, which invests in technology seeking to modernize retail and financial services, has raised more than $150 million for its fifth fund. My Fortune colleague Luisa Beltran has the story.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com