@OneProject & @Asana co-founder @humanetech_ advisor designer of systems, software, & culture in service of all beings
California
Joined September 2008
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I helped build Facebook's like button. It was meant to spread a little positivity. It became an engine for addiction, because addiction is more profitable than connection.
That wasn't a design failure. It was an economic one. And we're about to repeat it with AI.
Justin Rosenstein retweeted
This is incredible. 100% endorse JR for AI Czar.
The President is choosing an AI Czar, and I'm throwing my hat in the ring (dark horse though I may be). From developing Google Drive to founding Asana and One Project, I've spent a career helping people collaborate on hard problems. Collaborating to steer the future of AI is our hardest problem yet.
AI will supercharge whatever goals we give it. It could cure diseases, create industries, and make life more affordable for everyone. But if we aim its enormous power at the wrong goals, even unintentionally, the results could be catastrophic. I saw it happen after I helped create Facebook's Like button.
This isn't a partisan issue. We don't have to choose between the President's vision of "building America's Golden Age" and protecting human wellbeing. They're one and the same. As AI Czar, I would:
1. Let Americans decide what to do with the money AI generates.
President Trump wants Americans to share in AI's success, calling it "a partnership with the American public." He's right. A share of AI's wealth should go to the public: we, the people, whose cultural output is the resource these companies mine, and whose lives they'll disrupt. But if AI does all the work, and only a few people own it, a dividend check alone leaves the rest of us with no leverage at all. And handing the money to political appointees ties it to politics. Instead, I'd push for participatory budgeting, where Americans decide together how to invest it. In Columbus, Ohio, residents are practicing it to decide how to spend $9 million.
2. Give Americans a governing stake in major AI companies.
Senator Sanders has proposed the U.S. take a governing stake in the labs. I'd go one step further and put it in the hands of the American people, through a citizens' assembly on AI, not another Washington commission.
3. Lead the world toward international cooperation, like we did with nuclear safety.
The President has said, "Whoever wins AI, wins." But if AI puts humanity in danger, everyone loses. Just as America pioneered nuclear safety protocols and then led the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency, we can lead on democratic control of AI, with citizens' assemblies of everyday Americans, chosen by lottery and supported by experts, proposing the goals AI must serve and the guardrails it must honor. Washington would have to adopt each proposal or publicly explain why not. Assemblies are already shaping AI policy in the UK, Belgium, and Taiwan. Ours would also lend democratic legitimacy to U.S. proposals in talks like the ones Secretary Bessent recently began with China.
President Trump is optimistic about the future of AI, and I want to be too. As AI Czar, I would do what I do best: help people collaborate. Together, we can prevent the worst and realize the full promise of AI: a stronger, healthier, more prosperous America, and world.
If you agree that Americans deserve a say in AI's future, please share this, and share your ideas (or feedback on mine) in the comments.
The President is choosing an AI Czar, and I'm throwing my hat in the ring (dark horse though I may be). From developing Google Drive to founding Asana and One Project, I've spent a career helping people collaborate on hard problems. Collaborating to steer the future of AI is our hardest problem yet.
AI will supercharge whatever goals we give it. It could cure diseases, create industries, and make life more affordable for everyone. But if we aim its enormous power at the wrong goals, even unintentionally, the results could be catastrophic. I saw it happen after I helped create Facebook's Like button.
This isn't a partisan issue. We don't have to choose between the President's vision of "building America's Golden Age" and protecting human wellbeing. They're one and the same. As AI Czar, I would:
1. Let Americans decide what to do with the money AI generates.
President Trump wants Americans to share in AI's success, calling it "a partnership with the American public." He's right. A share of AI's wealth should go to the public: we, the people, whose cultural output is the resource these companies mine, and whose lives they'll disrupt. But if AI does all the work, and only a few people own it, a dividend check alone leaves the rest of us with no leverage at all. And handing the money to political appointees ties it to politics. Instead, I'd push for participatory budgeting, where Americans decide together how to invest it. In Columbus, Ohio, residents are practicing it to decide how to spend $9 million.
2. Give Americans a governing stake in major AI companies.
Senator Sanders has proposed the U.S. take a governing stake in the labs. I'd go one step further and put it in the hands of the American people, through a citizens' assembly on AI, not another Washington commission.
3. Lead the world toward international cooperation, like we did with nuclear safety.
The President has said, "Whoever wins AI, wins." But if AI puts humanity in danger, everyone loses. Just as America pioneered nuclear safety protocols and then led the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency, we can lead on democratic control of AI, with citizens' assemblies of everyday Americans, chosen by lottery and supported by experts, proposing the goals AI must serve and the guardrails it must honor. Washington would have to adopt each proposal or publicly explain why not. Assemblies are already shaping AI policy in the UK, Belgium, and Taiwan. Ours would also lend democratic legitimacy to U.S. proposals in talks like the ones Secretary Bessent recently began with China.
President Trump is optimistic about the future of AI, and I want to be too. As AI Czar, I would do what I do best: help people collaborate. Together, we can prevent the worst and realize the full promise of AI: a stronger, healthier, more prosperous America, and world.
If you agree that Americans deserve a say in AI's future, please share this, and share your ideas (or feedback on mine) in the comments.
The economy is an optimization system, just like AI. Its reward function is profit.
Profit has some relationship to people’s lives better (I grow a tomato, you buy it, we’re both better off). But the gap between profit and human welfare is vast.
We’ve had superintelligences (corporations) “reward hacking” that gap for hundreds of years, and it’s the cause of most of the world’s problems: climate change, addictive technology, sensationalist media, the opioid crisis, endless other problems.
This was already the most important root cause to address to improve life on Earth. But now transformative AI will supercharge this optimization to an extreme (including AI swarms building companies with no human conscience to slow them down).
*Aligning the economy* with human welfare may sound impossible, but we already have the tools to do it, and we need to do it now.
Imagine if companies got money based on how much good they were doing.
Imagine if our economy rewarded the right things.
In a world where we fund what matters, technology improves your life instead of stealing your time. Healthcare prevents disease instead of profiting from sickness. Neighborhoods get better without pricing people out. Companies compete to restore the planet. The media reports truth, not clickbait. Teachers, nurses, and artists get paid what they deserve. People’s basic needs are met, insulin is cheap, oceans are clean, and our children inherit a better world.
It’s possible, and, in an AI world, it’s urgent. I wrote about how to get there in @techpolicypress: techpolicy.press/the-like-bu…
In today's NYT, my colleague Aaron Tanaka argues that we the people should set AI's guardrails, through citizens' assemblies of everyday people, rather than leaving it to corporations and governments alone. “If A.I. shapes all our lives, all of us deserve a say in shaping its future."
Democratizing AI governance is a key part of the future we’re working toward at One Project, an economy whose rules and incentives are steered by the people, for the people.
nytimes.com/2026/09/17/opini…
AI will supercharge whatever economy we put it in. Let's put it in one governed by and for the people.
Full piece in @TechPolicyPress: techpolicy.press/the-like-bu…
Regulation is necessary and not enough. Corporations have routed around rules since the Gilded Age, and AI will help them reward-hack the economy faster.
The durable fix is economic alignment: reward what people want and need, and let the public decide what that is.
Nearly all AI alignment work is technical: getting the model to do what we ask. But what will we ask it to do? Whatever the economy rewards. And our economy rewards clicks over conversation, chopping trees over planting them, sugar over food.
I’ve been at the nexus of tech and philanthropy for a long time, and wow: the coming wave of AI-fueled philanthropy gives us a real shot at ending the need for philanthropy. But only if it takes a radically different approach.
@nanransohoff did the math and estimates between $37-$100B of new philanthropy per year will come from the OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic founders, and Anthropic employees. That’s a 6-17% increase in annual U.S. philanthropy. She argues we’re not prepared to absorb it, because there aren’t enough good philanthropic opportunities.
But that's only if you inherit an assumption from earlier waves: that philanthropy should accept the current economic system as fixed and exist to plug its holes. Conservation to protect the lands the system would destroy. Malaria nets for those it leaves behind.
This new wave of capital can do something radically different: change the rules of the game, so that philanthropy is no longer necessary for a flourishing society.
You get what you incentivize. I saw Facebook turn into an addiction machine because that’s what our economic system rewards. Food is laced with sugar, trees are cut down, wages are squeezed. Because that’s what the system rewards. The things the system doesn’t reward, like clean air and water, or arts and universities, are left to the tiny sliver of the economy that is philanthropy. If the whole economy is producing the problems, no amount of traditional philanthropy can solve them.
Instead, philanthropy can catalyze a democratic economy that’s aligned with the public interest. Where the whole economy works in service to the things currently left to philanthropy. And because AI will supercharge whatever economy it lives within, aligning the economy is essential to aligning AI.
I’ve invested more than $100M of my own money into this work via my non-profit @oneproject. They’ve funded 80+ organizations that have generated 400 policy victories, moved $2B+ of capital into community control, and more. Which is how I know that the field of economic democracy can absorb vastly more money: Nearly every day, we come across great organizations and talent that could be highly effective if only they had the money.
The most ambitious thing this wave could do isn't to get better at the endless fight for good. It's to actually win. To dare to win the structural changes that create a better world, rather than playing eternal crisis whack-a-mole.
If you’re about to join this new philanthropic (phil-Anthropic?) class, winning economic democracy is the most leveraged thing your philanthropy can possibly do, because it ends the need for philanthropy.
Philanthropy has always treated symptoms. The AI wave should cure the disease.
A bad future with AI isn't inevitable. Neither is a good one. It's a political choice. Here's what I told POLITICO: politico.com/newsletters/dig…
AI is built on all of us: every book ever written, every idea ever published, generations of collective human culture. Companies are adding a thin layer of math on top and capturing trillions in value. The public deserves a stake in the wealth and ownership that follows.