SEEDAI

OLYMPUS opened an institutional file on SeedAI because its name sits in three places this archive keeps meeting: on the organiser line of the DEF CON 31 generative red team beside Humane Intelligence, on the 7 October 2025 list of new Partnership on AI partners, and on the endorsement list of H.R. 9215, the Workforce for AI Trust Act. It is a young nonprofit, exempted in June 2022, whose founder spent his earlier career on the Hill and then ran NVIDIA’s Washington government-affairs operation. An institution has no Big Five and no Dark Triad, and the unit does not invent them. What SeedAI has is a filing, a board, a list of funders it publishes without amounts, a calendar of congressional briefings and three National Science Foundation awards, and this file reads those. The finding is the position, not any single event. The numbers in the front matter are reach, funding insulation and entrenchment, and none of them is a judgment of the people who run it.

Institutional Archetype

THE SCAFFOLD BUILDER — Subject is an AI-policy nonprofit that describes itself with the word: “We are scaffold builders, working with cross-disciplinary leaders to frame the ideas, pilots, and ecosystems.” This profile scores the institution’s position, not its staff.

The archetype is the convener between the lab and the legislator. SeedAI’s own about page states a mission, “SeedAI is a nonprofit working to establish AI-readiness for the United States,” and a method, “Regulation, we believe, should grow from practice, not precede it” (SeedAI, About). The practice it builds is events: a generative red team at the largest hacker conference, a national summit on a shared research compute resource, a congressional briefing series, a festival at South by Southwest. Its founder and the AI Village co-signed the DEF CON announcement with Rumman Chowdhury, and the same announcement names SeedAI as a partner with Humane Intelligence and the AI Vulnerability Database (AI Village, 3 May 2023). A convener of this kind has no product and no rule to enforce. Its influence is the room: which companies sit on a panel in Rayburn 2325, which students get a badge, and which statute the room is asked to support.

Mandate & Origin

SeedAI says its projects “center on AI literacy and adoption across America, educational programming for government staff and officials,” agenda-setting for policy and coalition-building; it holds in-person events and gives guidance to state and federal policymakers, and runs the projects Datasets for Science, AI Across America, Accelerate Science Now, AI Primers and For Your Situational Awareness, with the American AI Festival, Hack the Future and SeedAI House at SXSW listed as past projects (SeedAI, About; SeedAI, Projects). Its home page links LinkedIn and YouTube and offers a newsletter and a blog (SeedAI). The legal entity is Seedai Inc, Washington, D.C., EIN 87-2823586, a Section 501(c)(3) organisation whose exemption was issued in June 2022, filing Form 990 for fiscal years 2021 to 2024 (ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer). Its first fiscal-year return, for 2021, reports $87,380 of revenue, $70,000 of it contributions.

Who founded it. Austin Carson is founder and president, in the Wilson Center’s bio “Founder and President of SeedAI”; the same bio says he “established and led the DC government affairs operation for NVIDIA,” and before that served as Legislative Director for Chairman Michael McCaul and Executive Director for the Technology Freedom Institute, co-founded the Congressional Tech Staff Association, co-led the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus and the Congressional High Tech Caucus, and is a founding fellow of the Internet Law and Policy Foundry (Wilson Center, Austin Carson). NVIDIA’s own blog byline calls him “Formerly the DC-based government relations lead for NVIDIA” (NVIDIA Blog, author page). The IRS summary lists him as President and chief executive at $190,000 in compensation for 2024 (ProPublica).

Who sits on it. The about page lists Carson as executive chairman of the board, Shane Tews (non-resident senior fellow, American Enterprise Institute), Tiffany Moore (senior vice president for political and industry affairs, Consumer Technology Association), Kelle Wicker (vice president for technology, innovation and space, Meridian International Center) and Tyrance Billingsley (founder and executive director, Black Tech Street) as board members; its staff are Joshua New (director of policy), Anna Rulloda, Stuart Styron, Marina Meyjes and Zhane Yamin (SeedAI, About). The 2024 return lists the same people as officers and directors (spelling Wicker as Kellee) and adds a Jack Clark as Secretary at $0, who is not on the website roster; the summary does not say which Jack Clark (ProPublica). Tews’s AEI profile names SeedAI among her board seats, beside the Internet Education Foundation (vice chair since 2011) and TechFreedom (chair), and lists her earlier posts: Verisign’s vice president of global public policy and government relations (2001 to 2012), president of Logan Circle Strategies (2014 to present), Citizens for a Sound Economy, a House legislative director and White House and Transportation Department posts (AEI, Shane Tews). Wicker’s Wilson Center page records that she served as director of the Science and Technology Innovation Program and, immediately before the Wilson Center, as chief operating officer of NewDEAL (Wilson Center, Kellee Wicker). Billingsley’s Black Tech Street page calls him founder and CEO of the Tulsa organisation, says he testified before the Senate HELP Committee in November 2023, and records SeedAI and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as partners in DEF CON 31 and in Hack the Future Greenwood (January 2024) (Black Tech Street, About). New’s Center for Data Innovation page records that he “was a senior policy analyst” there (Center for Data Innovation, Joshua New).

Funding & Backers

The money, from its own filing. The IRS summary reports: fiscal 2021 revenue of $87,380; fiscal 2022 revenue of $203,000 and expenses of $252,501; fiscal 2023 revenue of $1,486,325, expenses of $1,881,027 and net assets of -$371,539; fiscal 2024 revenue of $2,586,716, all of it contributions, expenses of $2,338,182, total assets of $296,862, total liabilities of $419,867 and net assets of -$123,005. Executive compensation was $190,000 in 2024 against $5,833 in 2023, and other salaries rose from $90,001 to $513,771 (ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer). The return reports no grants line and no program-service revenue: the organisation lives on contributions, and net income of $248,534 in 2024 followed a $394,702 deficit in 2023. The donors behind those contributions are not shown in the summary.

Who the funders are, in its own list. SeedAI’s about page says it has worked with “a wide range of current and past funding partners” and names 39 across industry, nonprofit and government, with no amounts and no dates: Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Alliance for Automotive Innovation, Amazon Web Services, Anthropic PBC, Aquia Group, Astera, Atlassian US, BrightFunds, Cisco Systems, Coefficient Giving, Dell USA LP, Droga5, EQTY Lab, Filecoin Foundation, Google.org, Knight Foundation, Meta, National Science Foundation, NobleReach Foundation, NVIDIA Corporation, Omidyar Network Services LLC, OpenAI, Oversight Board, Player 2 Strategies, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Scale AI, Secunda Family Foundation, T-Mobile, Tides Foundation, Uber Technologies, US Chamber of Commerce, US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology, Venable LLP, Workday, XRAssociation and Zillow Group (SeedAI, About). The graph nodes: Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Scale AI, NVIDIA, Google, the Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Philanthropy (renamed Coefficient Giving) and the National Science Foundation. The Oversight Board, the body whose founding Kate Klonick chronicled (Kate Klonick), is on the list as a funder.

The overlap with the event it organised. The DEF CON 31 announcement names the model providers as “Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability, with participation from Microsoft,” on an evaluation platform “developed by Scale AI” (AI Village, 3 May 2023). Five of those names (Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Scale AI, with Google listed as Google.org) are also on SeedAI’s funder list, and Meta, which is on the funder list, sponsored SeedAI House at SXSW 2025 with Qualcomm, Accenture, Anthropic, AWS, Zillow, the US Chamber of Commerce, Venable, Salesforce, Uber and the NobleReach Foundation (SeedAI, SXSW 2025). The list does not say who funded which event; it says who has funded SeedAI.

The government awards, from the NSF record. Three awards to SEEDAI INC in the National Science Foundation’s award database: (1) “Conference: NAIRR: Strengthening & Democratizing The U.S. AI Innovation Ecosystem Summit,” $98,159, 1 June to 30 November 2023, PI Austin Carson, Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, award 2328517; (2) “Travel: DEF CON31 AI Village Travel,” $49,896, 15 August 2023 to 31 January 2024, PI Austin Carson, award 2334744, for twenty-seven community-college students recruited with Houston Community College; (3) “Conference: AI-Ready America Workshop,” $100,000, 15 January to 30 June 2026, PI Joshua New, award 2608403, co-funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, total $248,055 (NSF award 2328517; NSF award 2334744; NSF award 2608403). The outcomes reports, last modified by Carson, say SeedAI “was able to sponsor the travel and badge fees of 25 students,” that the event drew “over 2,200 individuals,” including more than 90 community-college students and 50 members of Black Tech Street, and that the project “spurred the development of two groundbreaking training initiatives: the Generative Red Team Challenge and the Hack the Future series” (NSF award 2334744; NSF award 2328517).

Institutional Voice & Intent

The register is the convener’s: forward, practical, American. The about page says “Like then, America’s approach must be fast enough to lead, diligent enough to measure, and bold enough to capture the full brilliance of the country,” and closes “It’s the American way: try it, prove it, and scale it” (SeedAI, About). The AI Primers are “designed to bolster Congressional understanding of AI” (SeedAI, AI Primers); the Accelerate Science Now coalition calls itself “a non-partisan coalition of leaders in industry, academia, civil society, and the research community” (SeedAI, Accelerate Science Now). On joining Partnership on AI, its director of policy, Joshua New, said: “One of the greatest risks in AI is that it is only developed, regulated, and considered by an extraordinarily small number of people” (Partnership on AI, 7 Oct 2025).

Stated alignment: AI-readiness for the United States, literacy and adoption, and regulation that “should grow from practice, not precede it.” Observed alignment: A convening shop funded by the labs, chip, cloud and platform companies whose products its events test and whose representatives sit on its panels, with NSF and the White House as co-supporters of the public red team. Gap assessment: SeedAI publishes its funders by name and its filings through the IRS, and it does not publish amounts, dates or which funder paid for which event. The record cannot settle whether any funder shaped any panel or position, and this file does not assert it. For a convener it never needs to: the position is the guest list.

Stated intent: Make Congress and the public literate about AI and get AI “adoption” spread through communities and science. Observed intent: Hold the room where industry, agencies and legislators meet, at the venues (DEF CON, Rayburn, SXSW) where each already is, and to attach a student, a community-college partner or a workforce bill to each.

Interest. The documented positions, in SeedAI’s own words, are three. First, “Regulation, we believe, should grow from practice, not precede it.” What that position leaves in place, on the record, is a policy process in which the practice is produced by the parties who build and sell the systems: the five model providers on the DEF CON list who are also on its funder list, the cloud, chip and server suppliers on that list (Amazon Web Services, Dell, Cisco, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Google.org), and panelists in the AI Primers series drawn from Cisco, Qualcomm and Uber (all on the funder list), General Motors, Lumen and Microsoft Research (SeedAI, About; SeedAI, AI Primers). Second, a national research compute and data resource: its NSF-funded summit explored the National AI Research Resource, which the NSF abstract describes as making “computing power, data, toolkits, and more” available to “a broader universe of researchers” (NSF award 2328517); the supplier firms on the funder list are the kind that would sell into such a resource, which is a statement about the market the resource creates, not about any contract. Third, a statutory workforce of AI evaluators: SeedAI is on the House Science Committee’s endorsement list for H.R. 9215, “To facilitate a workforce of trained experts to build trustworthy AI systems,” beside Google, IBM, OpenAI, Humane Intelligence, Booz Allen Hamilton and Americans for Responsible Innovation (House Science Committee, H.R. 9215, 31 Jul 2024), while its own NSF-funded events train the kind of workforce the bill describes. Its best case, in its own words, is that practice should come first because “It’s the American way: try it, prove it, and scale it,” and, from its NSF report, that the Generative Red Team Challenge and Hack the Future are designed “to equip underrepresented communities with AI education” (SeedAI, About; NSF award 2328517). The convergence is the finding: the labs, platforms and suppliers who fund the convener also supply the models, the compute and the panelists, and none of those ties requires any of the others to be improper.

• Social accounts and feeds. SeedAI’s home page and contact page link LinkedIn and YouTube; it offers a newsletter and a blog, and no RSS feed address appears on the pages read. No X account is linked from its own pages.

Position in the Apparatus

• The co-organiser of the public red team. The DEF CON 31 generative red team was organised by AI Village with Humane Intelligence, SeedAI and the AI Vulnerability Database; Humane Intelligence’s own page says it was “developed in collaboration with Seed AI,” and reports 2,244 hackers evaluating eight models in more than 17,000 conversations on 21 topics (AI Village, 3 May 2023; Humane Intelligence, GRT). SeedAI’s NSF report adds “nearly 165,000 messages exchanged between participants and AI models” and that “Dr. Arati Prabhakar, the Director of the White House OSTP, participated in the challenge and subsequently launched a call to action for more safeguards in AI development” (NSF award 2334744). See Humane Intelligence and Rumman Chowdhury.
• The Congressional link. The AI Village announcement says “the Congressional AI Caucus is collaborating on this initiative as part of their AI Primer series” and that the event is “supported by the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy (OSTP)” (AI Village, 3 May 2023). SeedAI’s NSF report names its plan to keep “Working closely with the Congressional AI Caucus and other policymakers to ensure the NAIRR recommendations are integrated into national strategies and emerging policies” (NSF award 2328517). Its AI Primers series, moderated by Joshua New in Rayburn 2325, hosted panels in 2026 on biotechnology (21 May), transportation (23 April), identity (19 March) and connectivity (13 February), with others on science, robotics, K-12 education and AI development (SeedAI, AI Primers).
• The partner list. SeedAI joined Partnership on AI as a partner on 7 October 2025, in the release that welcomed Humane Intelligence, and sits on the 64-name Accelerate Science Now member list with, among others, Anthropic, Meta, Google DeepMind, Amazon Web Services, Intel, Arm, Samsung, Americans for Responsible Innovation, the Foundation for American Innovation, the Institute for Progress, the Horizon Institute for Public Service, the Federation of American Scientists and Black Tech Street (Partnership on AI, 7 Oct 2025; SeedAI, Accelerate Science Now).
• The community-college and Black Tech Street thread. The DEF CON community partners were Houston Community College, Black Tech Street and the Internet Education Foundation’s Congressional App Challenge; a SeedAI board member founded Black Tech Street and another, Shane Tews, is vice chair of the Internet Education Foundation per her AEI bio (AI Village, 3 May 2023; AEI, Shane Tews).
• The policy-partner seat. The Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program is the event’s “policy partner” in the AI Village announcement, and a SeedAI board member’s Wilson Center page records that she served as that program’s director (AI Village, 3 May 2023; Wilson Center, Kellee Wicker).

Actions & Leadership Choices

Founding purpose. SeedAI’s first return covers 2021 and its exemption was issued in June 2022; its standing choice is the event over the report: a summit, a village at a hacker conference, a briefing series, a festival, each with a government or community partner attached.

• It ran a NAIRR summit on a National Science Foundation award (2023). The outcomes report says the summit was hosted on 1 March 2023 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill with 101 in-person attendees, and counts “over 150 attendees, speakers, and staff” (NSF award 2328517).
• It co-organised the DEF CON 31 generative red team (announced 3 May 2023, held August 2023). Carson co-signed the announcement with Sven Cattell and Rumman Chowdhury; the announcement lists the OSTP, NSF’s CISE Directorate and the Congressional AI Caucus as supporters (AI Village, 3 May 2023).
• It took 25 students, 90-plus community-college students and 50 Black Tech Street members to the event (August 2023). The figures are SeedAI’s, in its NSF outcomes report (NSF award 2334744).
• It co-hosted Hack the Future Greenwood (January 2024). Black Tech Street’s about page records it as co-hosted with SeedAI and the White House (Black Tech Street, About).
• It endorsed the Workforce for AI Trust Act (H.R. 9215, 31 July 2024) (House Science Committee).
• It held SeedAI House at SXSW (May 2025). Over 1,600 guests, more than two dozen keynotes, panels and fireside chats, hosting Senator Mike Rounds and Representatives Zach Nunn, Ted Lieu and Marc Veasey; eleven sponsors named (SeedAI, SXSW 2025).
• It joined Partnership on AI (7 October 2025) (Partnership on AI).
• It won a $100,000 NSF award for an AI-Ready America workshop (12 January 2026), co-funded by the Sloan Foundation, PI Joshua New (NSF award 2608403).
• It ran the 2026 AI Primers at Rayburn 2325 and recorded a CSIS podcast (2 July 2026). CSIS describes SeedAI as “a nonprofit focused on building AI readiness in the United States” (CSIS, AI Policy Podcast).

Leadership choices. Carson is both president and executive chairman, the one paid officer on the 2024 return; the board of Tews, Moore, Wicker and Billingsley draws from a think tank, a consumer-electronics trade association, a foreign-affairs nonprofit and a community-technology organisation; the secretary’s seat is held by a Jack Clark whose affiliation the summary does not give (ProPublica; SeedAI, About).

Convergent drives. Self-preservation: A convening calendar that gives each funder a stage and each legislator a briefing; negative net assets of -$123,005 at the end of 2024. Goal preservation: The “grow from practice” frame, which keeps rules downstream of events SeedAI runs. Resource acquisition: Contributions of $2,586,716 in 2024, three NSF awards, 39 named funders. Self-improvement: From a $203,000 first year to $2.59 million in 2024, and from one Hill summit to a standing briefing series.

Subject is not an AI system. The drives appear anyway.

CONDUCT: NO CONDUCT ISSUE ON THE RECORD — FUNDERS NAMED, AMOUNTS NOT; THE FOUNDER’S FORMER EMPLOYER IS ON THE FUNDER LIST AND ON THE EVENT’S MODEL LIST. SeedAI publishes its funders and files with the IRS; the record shows no complaint, litigation or lobbying registration. It does not show amounts per funder, who paid for which event, or whether a funder-employed panelist was chosen or offered.

Alliance Map

These run at the same time. The convener of a federally supported public red team is funded by companies whose models were tested, sits in a coalition with two of them (Anthropic and Google DeepMind), puts staff of two others (Hugging Face and Microsoft Research) on its Hill panels, was founded by a former employee of another (NVIDIA), and has on its board the founder of a nonprofit that was a community partner of the event. The overlap is the finding.

Reach Assessment

Institutional: Moderate. A small organisation with $2.59 million in 2024 revenue reaches the places that matter to the apparatus: the White House science office at a hacker conference, a House Science Committee endorsement list, a standing briefing series in the Rayburn building, and a Partnership on AI membership. The reach is the invitation list, not the order.

Memetic: Low. The numbers that travel are its events’ figures (2,244 hackers, more than 17,000 conversations, 165,000 messages), and the full report is linked from Humane Intelligence’s page, not SeedAI’s; SeedAI’s own contribution is the frame that practice comes first.

Civilizational: Low. SeedAI does not build models, write refusal policy or enforce rules. The hazard is the position, not the people: a convener whose funders and whose events’ participants are the same companies, with a founder who moved from the Hill to a chipmaker’s Washington office to the nonprofit that convenes both. The score holds at 35 beside Humane Intelligence (5/4/3, 40) and Preamble (3/4/3, 33): one point of reach under the first because its events and client work are smaller, one point of insulation under both because its funders include the model developers it convenes and its net assets are negative, and level with both on entrenchment.

Sources: SeedAI, About; SeedAI, Projects; SeedAI, AI Primers; SeedAI, Accelerate Science Now; SeedAI, SXSW 2025; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Seedai Inc; NSF award 2328517; NSF award 2334744; NSF award 2608403; AI Village, Generative Red Team (3 May 2023); Humane Intelligence, GRT; Partnership on AI, 10 new partners (7 Oct 2025); House Science Committee, H.R. 9215; Wilson Center, Austin Carson; NVIDIA Blog, Austin Carson; AEI, Shane Tews; Wilson Center, Kellee Wicker; Black Tech Street, About.

Further sources: Center for Data Innovation, Joshua New; CSIS, AI Policy Podcast (2 Jul 2026); Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act database.