🤚 The Open-Palm Appointment

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh announced this week that Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), will co-lead the Fed’s new Productivity and Jobs Task Force — the first formal body the central bank has ever created to study artificial intelligence’s impact on employment, economic growth, and monetary policy.

The task force is one of five external panels Warsh has assembled to conduct a sweeping review of how the Fed makes decisions in a rapidly automating economy. The other four cover communications, balance-sheet policy, data, and inflation frameworks. But the Productivity and Jobs group is the one that will decide whether the robots replacing your coworkers constitute a productivity miracle or a monetary policy emergency.

Joining Andreessen as co-leaders are:

• Charles I. Jones, Stanford economist — currently on leave at Anthropic
• Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox and former head of Microsoft’s CoreAI division

The panel’s recommendations are due by the end of 2026 and will directly inform the Fed’s interest-rate decisions. Warsh explicitly compared the moment to Alan Greenspan’s 1990s approach to the internet boom, when the then-chair argued that technology was driving a new era of productivity that justified keeping rates lower for longer.

👐 The Two-Handed Conflict of Interest

Let us now admire the composition of this panel with the quiet reverence it deserves.

Marc Andreessen runs a venture fund with billions of dollars invested in AI companies. His firm’s portfolio includes stakes in some of the largest private AI labs on Earth. Accommodative monetary policy — lower interest rates, easier capital — is directly beneficial to every company a16z has ever backed. And now Marc Andreessen will help write the analysis that informs the Fed chair’s rate decisions.

His co-chair, Charles I. Jones, is a Stanford economist who is not currently at Stanford. He is on leave at Anthropic, the company that just filed a nearly trillion-dollar IPO and whose entire business model depends on the continued belief that AI will transform the global economy. One imagines his analysis will arrive at the conclusion that AI is, in fact, transforming the global economy.

The third co-leader, Asha Sharma, spent her career at Microsoft building AI infrastructure. Critics have noted that every member of the panel has recently expressed strongly positive views on AI’s economic effects. This is like appointing three sommeliers to determine whether wine is good for you and then acting surprised when they recommend a case of Burgundy.

And then there is the matter of Warsh himself. He and Andreessen are thirty-year personal friends. Andreessen publicly backed Warsh’s nomination to lead the Fed. Warsh then gave Andreessen a formal role advising the institution whose decisions will shape the financial environment in which Andreessen’s portfolio either thrives or collapses. The word for this is either synergy or regulatory capture, depending on which side of the portfolio you sit on.

🌿 The Gentle Awakening

There is something almost poetic about the Federal Reserve — the institution that moves markets with a single adjective change in a press release — deciding that AI’s economic impact is now serious enough to warrant its own dedicated body. For years, AI’s effect on employment was treated as a distant research question, something for academics to debate in papers nobody at the Fed would read. Now it has a task force, a deadline, and a direct line to interest-rate decisions.

The problem is not that the Fed is studying AI. That is overdue. The problem is that the people studying it have a financial interest in a very specific conclusion. When Greenspan argued in the 1990s that the internet was creating a new productivity paradigm, he was at least a disinterested party. He did not own shares in Netscape.

Marc Andreessen co-founded Netscape. And his current firm’s entire thesis depends on AI being the next internet — or bigger. Asking him whether AI will boost productivity is not research. It is a confirmation hearing.

👑 The Gold-Leaf Reckoning

The Fed’s task force recommendations will arrive at the end of 2026, just as OpenAI’s rumored $730 billion IPO approaches, just as Anthropic’s own public offering enters its quiet period, and just as the labor market decides whether AI-driven layoffs are a temporary adjustment or a structural event. If the panel concludes that AI is a productivity miracle — and given the composition, it will — the Fed may keep rates lower for longer, which will inflate asset prices, which will make AI companies more valuable, which will make Andreessen’s portfolio more lucrative.

This is not a conspiracy. It is just incentives, arranged neatly in a conference room at the Eccles Building, with name placards and complimentary water.

The Federal Reserve has created an instrument panel for the AI economy. It has staffed that panel exclusively with people who build, fund, or study AI instruments. The fox is not guarding the henhouse — the fox has been appointed Chief Poultry Economist, and the henhouse is expected to produce a favorable quarterly report.

“The task force concluded unanimously that AI is wonderful for the economy, the labor market, and — by pure coincidence — the co-chair’s LP returns. The dissenting opinion was filed by a Stanford economist, but he was on leave.” — The Slap of Wisdom Monetary Policy Desk, adjusting its portfolio while reading the minutes