Cosmos Institute granted Nadia Asparouhova and Tim Hwang on September 10, 2024 to convene a pre-election seminar series on the political ideologies shaping AI development in Silicon Valley. Funding fell in the $1K to $10K Cosmos Ventures fast-grant range.
Asparouhova (previously published as Nadia Eghbal) is the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Stripe Press) and Antimemetics, with essays in The New Atlantis, American Affairs, Tablet, and Wired. She has been running a multi-year project on tech's social and political influence, supported in part by an Emergent Ventures grant. Hwang is General Counsel at Abridge, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, former Director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, and author of Subprime Attention Crisis (FSG, 2020). Hwang previously led Google's global AI policy outreach and held roles at Substack and Inflection AI.
The seminars were convened in fall 2024 and brought together philanthropic funders, operators, writers, and academics across tech media, policy, and philanthropy. The framing departed from the standard left-right-libertarian map: Asparouhova subsequently published "Rewriting the Californian Ideology" in American Affairs (May 2025), revisiting Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's 1995 essay to argue that Silicon Valley's politics resist the conventional categories that journalists and policymakers usually apply.
Within Cosmos's portfolio the grant is a governance-layer bet, a research convening rather than a software project. It sits adjacent to the larger AI x Truth-Seeking program by treating the upstream question (what ideologies inform the people building frontier AI) rather than the downstream tools the cohort produces.
Recipient
Nadia Asparouhova and Tim Hwang
Funder
Cosmos Institute · foundation · US
Backs philosopher-builders making prototypes, essays, and projects at the intersection of AI and human flourishing, with emphasis on reason, decentralization, and individual autonomy.
Primary source
https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/announcing-cosmos-ventures
Additional sources
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