Fed AI Panel Lead Has $90B Invested in the Technology He’ll Be Judging

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Marc Andreessen — co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm managing $90 billion in assets and holding $3.4 billion in AI-specific investments raised just six months ago — will co-lead the Federal Reserve task force responsible for telling the FOMC whether artificial intelligence reduces inflation. As Chair Kevin Warsh prepares to face Congress this week on an inflation report that describes core prices running at roughly double the Fed’s target, the choice of who will shape that AI verdict is drawing scrutiny that the Fed has so far declined to address.

Task Force Appointment Puts AI Investor at Center of Rate Deliberations

On July 9, the Fed formally named three co-leads for its “Productivity and Jobs” panel: Andreessen; Charles I. Jones, a Stanford economist currently on leave at Anthropic; and Asha Sharma, Microsoft’s executive vice president and CEO of its Xbox division, according to the Federal Reserve’s official announcement. The panel’s mandate is to “assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments” — a charge that runs directly into the most consequential open question in monetary policy: does AI reduce inflation, raise it, or both, and on what timeline?

The timing could not be more pointed. Warsh testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on July 14 and the Senate Banking Committee on July 15, delivering the Fed’s first Semiannual Monetary Policy Report under his chairmanship. That report stated that U.S. inflation “stepped up further this spring,” with the Fed’s preferred measure of underlying price pressure — the core Personal Consumption Expenditures index — running approximately 3.4 percent over the prior year, or nearly double the Fed’s 2 percent target.

The task force findings, expected by year-end, are not binding on the Federal Open Market Committee. But Warsh has made clear they are not ceremonial either. He has…

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