Features

Fed taps Marc Andreessen to co-lead new AI productivity task force

Chair Kevin Warsh has handed a venture capitalist, a Stanford economist on leave at Anthropic, and Microsoft's Xbox CEO the job of telling the central bank what AI will do to jobs, output, and rates.

By Markus Voskuhl · Features & longform · 2026-07-11 · 3 min read

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0 — Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, speaking at a public event.

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh on Thursday named Marc Andreessen, Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, and Microsoft executive Asha Sharma to co-lead a new Productivity and Jobs task force, one of five advisory groups Warsh unveiled to tell the central bank what artificial intelligence will do to growth, employment, and, by implication, interest rates.

The task forces, Warsh said, will “assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.” They’re meant to “operate independently, with a mandate to follow the evidence, provide candid feedback, and produce rigorous findings for the Federal Open Market Committee.” Findings are due by year’s end.

Read the roster and the answer is largely pre-loaded. Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, is described by The Washington Post as an adviser to President Donald Trump and one of Silicon Valley’s most aggressive promoters of AI. Jones is on leave from Stanford to join The Anthropic Institute, part of AI firm Anthropic, and has argued in a recent paper that “if AI eventually automates away nearly all the weak links in the economy, economic growth could accelerate significantly, with rates potentially exceeding 5 percent per year”, against a U.S. historical trend of roughly 2% per-capita growth. Sharma, who became Xbox CEO in February, runs the one Microsoft business that has conspicuously not put AI front and center even as the rest of the company weaves it everywhere else.

The other task forces are stacked similarly, with names including former Bank of England governor Mervyn King, Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, NYU Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent, and former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon. CNBC reports Warsh selected the members personally, and that their prior views on AI as a transformative technology align with his own.

That matters because recent discussions inside the Fed have been skeptical of AI’s productivity payoff. Warsh, asked last year about Andreessen, called him one of his “friends from my days in college.” The Fed chair has now built an advisory apparatus whose intellectual priors point one direction, and handed a co-lead seat to a venture capitalist who, in late June, also joined the U.S. Defense Policy Board.

The task force will follow the evidence. It will also, almost certainly, find it.

Sources