Fed names Marc Andreessen to AI task force on jobs and productivity

The Federal Reserve named Marc Andreessen to a new task force on productivity and jobs, putting one of Silicon Valley’s best-known AI boosters inside a central bank effort to judge how automation may change wages, hiring, and growth. Kevin Warsh personally selected the task-force members, and he has been friends with Andreessen for decades.

The five outside task forces announced July 9 covered communications, balance sheet policy, data, productivity and jobs, and inflation frameworks. The Fed said each group would be co-led by external advisers, supported by Fed staff, and expected to follow the evidence, offer candid feedback, and produce rigorous findings for the Federal Open Market Committee.

Andreessen will co-lead the AI-focused panel with Charles I. Jones, a Stanford University economics professor who is on leave at Anthropic, and Asha Sharma, an executive at Microsoft and Xbox. The task force’s formal charge is to assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform policy judgments. That puts a prominent investor, an academic economist, and a senior technology executive into a role that could shape how the Fed interprets productivity data and labor-market shifts tied to AI.

The data task force, led by Raj Chetty, Doug McMillon, and Kevin Murphy, adds another layer to the Fed’s push for more current economic intelligence. McMillon’s presence is notable because the former Walmart chief brings a view of consumer spending, pricing, and inventory flows that the central bank has said it wants to see more quickly and in more usable form. The Fed said that group is intended to improve the quality and timeliness of real economic signals, including information on spending, inflation, and growth.

Warsh has argued that the U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation and that the Fed’s methods and tools may need improvement. In June, he said AI was “perhaps as important a change in the economy and business and households” as he had seen in his adult lifetime. At the Fed’s June 17 meeting, the central bank kept rates unchanged in a 3.50% to 3.75% range, underscoring how these task forces fit into a broader review of monetary-policy operations while the institution weighs how fast-changing technologies affect the economy it is trying to steer.