The Fed Builds an AI and Jobs Task Force

The Federal Reserve now has a group whose job is to work out what artificial intelligence will do to American jobs. On July 9, Chair Kevin Warsh announced five new task forces and handed one of them, covering productivity, employment and AI, to a panel of three co-leads, according to Axios and The Washington Post.

The best-known of the three is Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and one of the loudest voices arguing that AI will make workers richer rather than redundant. Alongside him sit Asha Sharma, the Microsoft executive who runs its Xbox division, and Charles I. Jones, a Stanford economist currently on leave at Anthropic. A chip-and-model investor, a big-tech operator and an academic on loan to a frontier lab: the roster tells you how blurred the line between industry and policy has become.

The mandate

The task force is charged with studying how "new general-purpose technologies," AI chief among them, move the labour market and productivity growth. Its findings are meant to feed the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that sets interest rates, with recommendations due by the end of 2026. The group will lean on Fed staff for support but is designed to operate at arm's length.

The question it is chasing is a genuinely hard one. If AI lifts productivity, it could take pressure off prices. If it throws people out of work faster than the economy can absorb them, the effect runs the other way. Fed officials have been arguing about which force wins, and the honest answer is that nobody yet knows.

The obvious tension

Putting Andreessen in this seat has already drawn objections. His firm has billions riding on the AI companies whose effect on jobs the panel is supposed to judge, and critics were quick to flag the conflict. Supporters counter that few people understand the technology's trajectory better than the investors funding it. Both things can be true at once.

The stakes are not abstract. AI has already become the reason many US employers give for cutting jobs, and the fear that it is hollowing out entry-level work keeps surfacing in the data. A central bank that misreads which way automation pushes could set rates wrong for years. That is the bet Warsh is making by building this group now.