The Abundance Institute is a US nonprofit that advocates for a light-touch, pro-innovation regulatory environment for emerging technologies, including AI, energy, and digital infrastructure. It describes its mission as creating the cultural and policy environment for emerging technologies to develop and thrive before they capture public attention, through talent development, supporting a community of founders and innovators, and shaping public policies before emerging technologies go mainstream (Source: abundance.institute). It is generally aligned with the "abundance" policy current that favors removing regulatory barriers to growth and deployment, and it typically argues against new restrictions on AI development.
Organization and people
Chris Koopman is the organization's CEO. Its AI policy work is led by Neil Chilson, a lawyer and computer scientist who previously served as Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission and as a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, and who is the author of the book Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World (Source: abundance.institute; thecgo.org). Kevin Frazier serves as Senior Fellow for AI Policy; Taylor Barkley directs federal government affairs and Bryce Chinault directs state government affairs (Source: abundance.institute).
Projects
The institute runs several public-facing projects: AI Opportunities, a catalog of beneficial AI applications; an AI Legislative Red Teaming tool that stress-tests proposed AI legislation for potential exploits and manipulation by self-interested stakeholders; a Nuclear Atlas of US nuclear energy; and a Data Center Atlas mapping US data-center buildout (Source: abundance.institute).
Positions and activities
On June 24, 2026, the Abundance Institute joined Americans for Responsible Innovation in publicly opposing the Trump administration's export-control directive requiring Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. The pairing was reported as drawing together organizations that more often sit on opposite sides of AI-regulation debates — Abundance from the deregulatory side and ARI from the safety-and-guardrails side — into a shared objection to the use of export controls as a de facto model-licensing tool (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See Anthropic, Anthropic v. United States (Pentagon ban challenge).
Relationships
- related: Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), Export Controls (AI), Anthropic
- related: Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics — the institute's Data Center Atlas maps the US data-center buildout