Karen Kornbluh

Karen Kornbluh is a visiting fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology. She served until January as Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Office.

Ambassador Kornbluh has held leadership positions in government, business, and nonprofits. She previously served as Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), spearheading the first global internet policymaking principles and launching the OECD Gender Initiative. She was Policy Director for then-Senator Barack Obama, and served as a senior official at the Treasury Department and Federal Communications Commission, where she negotiated early internet policies.

Her private sector experience began as an economist at forecasting firm Townsend-Greenspan and included strategy consulting to Fortune 100 companies at Telesis, as well as serving as Executive Vice President at Nielsen, the global data firm.

She chaired the boards of both the Open Technology Fund and Radio Free Europe, and ran programs on technology and society at the Council on Foreign Relations, New America, and the German Marshall Fund of the U.S.

She is a Washingtonian “Tech Titan,” and was profiled in a New York Times article titled “Fighting for Economic Equality.“ Her articles have appeared in an array of outlets, including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Maryland Economic Commission.