Democratic Megadonor Ron Conway Taps Jay Carney To Lead New Ai Policy Center

SAN FRANCISCO — Democratic megadonor and Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway has tapped former Obama press secretary Jay Carney to run a new initiative aimed at shaping national AI policy.

The effort from Conway’s San Francisco-based investment firm SV Angel, dubbed Project Blueprint, intends to fill a vacuum between policymakers and the AI industry ahead of a midterm cycle where Democrats are poised to make gains in Congress, according to a backgrounder shared with POLITICO.

It appears to represent a major play from one of the Democrats’ biggest financial backers to assert influence over national AI policy after Republican-aligned tech figures like a16z’s Marc Andreessen and White House adviser David Sacks have dominated the issue during President Donald Trump’s second term. And it comes at a critical point in AI advancement that has industry leaders clamoring for a slowdown, in hopes of better controlling the technology’s potentially dire risks to humanity.

“The concerns driving debate around AI are legitimate. They’re not exaggerated or a proxy for something else, and they shouldn’t be dismissed,” the backgrounder reads. It calls for a “trusted bridge between the people building AI and the lawmakers who will help write the rules.”

Carney will lead the project as part of his new role as general partner and head of public policy and communications at SV Angel. He has spent more than a decade in leading policy and communications roles at Amazon and Airbnb since leaving the White House in 2014.

AI will transform the world “more than any innovation in our lifetimes,” Carney said in a statement. “If we get the policies that govern AI right, we can ensure that innovation is balanced with security, and that the American people feel like beneficiaries of the transformation instead of bystanders."

The project is framed as a cross-industry collaboration, designed to avoid overindexing on one AI company’s ideas and instead source policy proposals from numerous frontier labs, open-source platforms and data infrastructure, according to the backgrounder. It describes an ultimate goal of building ”non-partisan policies durable enough to survive changes in power.”

But the fact that it’s being created under one of the Democrats’ biggest allies in tech and run by a former Obama aide isn’t lost on observers.

“The median position on AI gets overshadowed by the extremism of the Trump administration, the extremism of the head-in-the-sand ostrich approach, doing nothing,” said Jason Elliott, a consultant and former adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) currently working in tech policy. “More voices is better, more perspectives is better.”

Other Project Blueprint goals include protecting U.S. global AI leadership from competitors like China, fortifying cybersecurity defenses, bolstering youth AI safety guardrails, managing job displacement and exploring ways to redistribute AI industry profits.

The backgrounder describes a U.S. data center build-out as essential but calls concerns about rising power bills and sustainability concerns “real and growing” — warning that “ignoring the backlash and complaining that the public is misinformed is a mistake.”