Former President Barack Obama posted on X today, welcoming what he called a "growing recognition that how this powerful new technology develops should be at the center of our public debate." He said he was "encouraged" that frontier lab leaders had "agree[d] on the need to slow down the pace of AI development," called himself neither "an AI accelerationist" nor "a doomer," and pointed to a new initiative: "Building on the statements that frontier companies have already made, some leaders in the space announced they're launching what they call Project Blueprint to help tech companies and policy makers work together on setting stronger standards and guidelines for AI development." He was quoting Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook report that Jay Carney — Obama's own White House press secretary from 2011 to 2014 — is joining Ron Conway's venture firm SV Angel to run it.
What the labs actually agreed to
Start with the claim doing the most work in Obama's post: that the frontier labs "agree on the need to slow down the pace of AI development." This blog read Amodei's essay closely three days ago, and that's not quite what it says. Amodei is explicit in his own text: "pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress." The one thing Anthropic actually committed to is embedded third-party evaluators with badge access and publication rights — a real, unusual step, but a verification mechanism, not a slower release cadence. Anthropic shipped Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 eleven days before the essay published, and nothing in it suggested the next model would arrive later than it otherwise would have. Sam Altman's response the same day — "independent evaluators with employee-like access" — was narrower still, and this blog noted at the time that access without a publication right is an internal red team with visitors' badges, not a pace commitment either. "The industry agreed to slow down" is a common shorthand for what happened Saturday, and Obama's post uses it too, but the essays themselves — read on their own terms rather than their own headlines — describe agreeing to be watched, not agreeing to go slower.
Who Project Blueprint actually is
Jay Carney's post-government career is a specific, checkable record, not a blank credential. After leaving the Obama White House, he became Amazon's senior vice president of global corporate affairs, where his most visible work was managing the company's public response to warehouse unionization drives — a role that drew direct comparisons, including a video montage from the progressive outlet More Perfect Union, contrasting his Amazon-era statements with his Obama-era ones defending collective bargaining rights. He left Amazon for Airbnb in 2022 as global head of policy and communications, departed that role this past July, and is now the public face of an initiative described, per Sorkin's reporting, as building "a trusted" channel between AI companies and government. None of that makes Carney unqualified for the job — a "government fluency and corporate strategy" combination is exactly what a bridge-building role calls for — but it's a record of being a highly credible spokesperson for whichever institution is paying him, which is worth knowing before taking "trusted" at face value.
The more load-bearing fact is who's paying him now. Ron Conway, SV Angel's co-founder, is also a co-founder of Leading the Future, a super PAC formed in August 2025 that has raised over 45 million and still held over $31 million in cash, more than a year into an active midterm strategy.
Two initiatives, one funder, no confirmed link beyond that
To be precise about what is and isn't established here: nothing in the reporting on Project Blueprint describes it as formally affiliated with Leading the Future, and this post found no evidence the two share staff, a legal structure, or funding beyond both tracing back to Conway. Project Blueprint is described as a policy-and-relationship effort at a venture firm; Leading the Future is a registered super PAC that spends on elections. Those are different instruments, and conflating them would overstate what's actually known. What is established, and worth sitting with rather than smoothing over: the same investor who spent the last thirteen months building a $140 million electoral operation explicitly designed to defeat AI-regulation-minded candidates has now hired a former Democratic press secretary — with Obama's own public blessing — to build "trusted" relationships between AI companies and the policymakers Leading the Future is simultaneously spending money to elect or defeat based on their views of the industry. A genuine bridge-building effort and a friendlier second front in the same influence campaign would look identical from the outside at launch. The distinction only becomes checkable once Project Blueprint's own funding, staff, and relationship to Conway's other AI-policy vehicles become public — none of which has happened yet.
The same question this week keeps asking, now about the lobbying layer
This is the same structural concern this blog has tracked all week at the technical-standards layer — whether the people proposing to referee AI's development have an answer that happens to leave them holding the whistle — showing up one layer down, in the machinery that actually writes legislation and funds campaigns. Jack Dorsey's essay yesterday put the general version of the objection plainly: "preserving a company's commercial advantage is not a safety objective." Dorsey was writing about coordinated technical limits among lab CEOs. The same logic applies to a coordinated influence operation among lab investors: a $140 million fund built to defeat regulation-minded candidates, paired with a policy-bridge initiative staffed by a trusted former official, is not proof of bad faith on its own — Conway could sincerely believe both that AI needs guardrails and that badly designed ones would be worse than none — but it's exactly the kind of dual structure that makes "stronger standards and guidelines," in Obama's own phrase, worth asking who actually gets to define "stronger" before assuming the word means what it sounds like.
Obama's own position in this
Obama isn't Conway, and nothing here suggests he has a financial stake in Leading the Future or Project Blueprint. His framing — not an accelerationist, not a doomer, Democrats need "a very clear plan" — echoes remarks he made at a DCCC fundraiser five days earlier, on September 10, and reads as a genuine, independently arrived-at position rather than a talking point handed to him. But his public endorsement is doing real work for Project Blueprint regardless of his motive: a former two-term president amplifying a year-old venture financier's new hire as a "trusted" channel lends credibility that the underlying facts, read plainly, haven't yet earned on their own. Whether Project Blueprint turns out to be the good-faith standard-setting effort Obama's post describes, or the more polished half of an operation whose other half is actively spending tens of millions of dollars to shape who gets to write those standards, is a question this week's news cycle answered for exactly nobody today — including, on the evidence available, Obama himself.