The U.S. Federal Reserve established a “Productivity and Employment” working group, commissioning research on the impact of AI from the founder of a16z and formulating monetary policy.

Artificial intelligence officially enters the U.S. monetary policy decision-making circle! According to Cointelegraph, the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) announced it will recruit Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the top venture capital firm a16z, along with other technology titans, to jointly lead the newly established “Productivity and Jobs” task force. The task force will help the Fed assess the two-sided impact of AI development on U.S. inflation and the broader economy, and is expected to submit policy recommendations to the FOMC by the end of this year.
(Background: Sony sues Suno this month—does training AI on copyrighted songs count as “fair use”? This is the first case to reach court.)
(Background add-on: Beijing is reportedly considering controlling DeepSeek and the Moon’s Dark Side, because China’s AI models are being rapidly and cheaply exploited in Silicon Valley.)

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• Fed establishes five task forces, and tech giants join in
• The deep alliance between Silicon Valley and the Fed
• Is AI anti-inflation or does it push up prices? FOMC views diverge

The technological revolution brought by artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the global industrial landscape. Now, this new wave of technology is blowing more formally into the highest decision-making hall of U.S. monetary policy.

According to the latest overseas media report dated July 10, 2026, the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed), under sweeping reforms by its newly appointed chair Kevin Warsh, is rolling out an in-depth policy framework review and, for the first time ever, bringing Silicon Valley’s top capital power into the central think tank at the heart of the central bank.

Fed establishes five task forces, and tech giants join in

To respond to the rapidly changing macroeconomic environment, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh announced the creation of five entirely new monetary policy task forces focused on: policy communication, balance-sheet policy, data quality, the inflation framework, and “Productivity and Jobs.”

Among them, the “Productivity and Jobs” task force, which has attracted the most attention in the market, has been recruited by the Federal Reserve to lead jointly with a heavyweight all-star lineup, including:

• Marc Andreessen: co-founder of the well-known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and a key dealmaker in the cryptocurrency and AI sectors.
• Charles I. Jones: an economics professor at Stanford University, currently on academic leave at the AI unicorn Anthropic.
• Asha Sharma: executive vice president at Microsoft and CEO of Xbox.

This dream team, made up of external technology leaders and Fed internal experts, will use “first principles” to re-examine monetary policy and is expected to submit specific policy recommendations to the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) by the end of this year.

The deep alliance between Silicon Valley and the Fed

Behind this appointment is also the revelation of deep personal ties between the current Fed chair and Silicon Valley. In fact, Kevin Warsh and Marc Andreessen’s friendship dates back to their university days at Stanford in the 1990s. In a media interview in 2025, Warsh openly revealed that Andreessen and the well-known venture capitalist Peter Thiel are both his close college friends; and Andreessen had previously also publicly stated his support for Warsh to serve as Fed chair.

The official position of the Federal Reserve emphasizes that these task forces will operate independently, with necessary support provided by Fed staff members to ensure they can objectively assess the far-reaching impact of AI technology on the structure of the U.S. economy.

Is AI anti-inflation or does it push up prices? FOMC views diverge

The core reason for bringing in AI experts this time is that there is currently serious disagreement within the Fed’s decision-making leadership about exactly how AI will affect inflation.

On one hand, some officials and scholars are optimistic that AI will be a powerful long-term “anti-inflation” force, capable of significantly boosting labor productivity and GDP growth—something that aligns with the expectations of Fed Governor Lisa Cook. However, the other camp has issued a stern warning that, in order for tech giants to develop AI, they are currently crazily pouring in hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers and infrastructure. Former chair Jerome Powell has also clearly pointed out that such massive hardware spending and energy consumption are creating strong “inflationary pressure” on the prices of U.S. goods and services.

As the tug-of-war between AI frenzy and the price index continues, this special group made up of Silicon Valley pioneers such as a16z will, in how it interprets AI economics to the FOMC, inevitably become one of the few key factors that will influence the direction of U.S. interest rates over the coming years and the pricing of global risk assets.