AI is remaking the institutions of a free society
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What will you build for?
The AI age needs philosopher-builders: people who turn conviction about human goods into institutions.
Benjamin Franklin believed knowledge should be widely shared, so he built a subscription library. He believed a republic needed many independent voices, so he seeded a network of printers. He believed ordinary people could form themselves, so he founded the Junto, a club for mutual improvement.
Those institutions enlarged the people who took part in them, and those people built a free society.
That task is ours now. Cosmos backs founders and researchers building the institutions that help us author our own lives and renew free society.
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We publish weekly essays on AI, autonomy, and what a free society needs. Contributors are frontier researchers, founders, and philosophers.
https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/
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We conduct and support original research at the intersection of philosophy and AI. Our fellows work at the frontier: leading AI labs, research groups, and the Human-Centered AI Lab at Oxford University.
We fund early-stage projects building AI tools that serve human autonomy and truth-seeking. Over 100 prototypes have been supported, from decentralized knowledge systems to tools that strengthen human judgment.
We convene founders, researchers, and philosophers to press on the hardest questions AI raises for a free society. Partners include the Oxford University, Google DeepMind, Liberty Fund, St. John's College, Aspen Institute, and Edge Esmeralda.
Cosmos is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a research home at Oxford's Human-Centered AI Lab and a team in London, New York, and around the world.
Meet the Cosmos community
Zoe Weinberg is the founder and managing partner of ex/ante, a venture fund focused on technology that advances human agency and user control over privacy, data, assets, and algorithms. Before founding ex/ante, Zoe worked on ethics and policy issues at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Google AI. She also has experience in national security, having worked in Mosul, Iraq, during the counter-ISIL operation in 2017, and in various roles at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Goldman Sachs. Zoe holds a BA from Harvard University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where she was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Her research and writing has been published in the New York Times and Foreign Affairs, among other publications.
Zoe helped start and co-leads our Cosmos Grants program. With ex/ante Zoe invests in a world that centers autonomy, freedom, and choice. She writes about that here.