Chamber of Progress is a US center-left tech-industry policy coalition founded on March 29, 2021 and led by founder and CEO Adam Kovacevich. It advocates on technology-regulation questions from a Democratic orientation and has been a recurring opponent of state-level frontier-AI and online-safety bills, positioning itself as a deployer- and developer-aligned counterweight in the AI-federalism and state-level-AI-regulation debates.
Overview
Kovacevich, the founder and CEO, is a Democratic tech-policy operative who was Google's seventh Washington, D.C. hire and led Google's U.S. public-policy team before later roles at Lime and the Information Technology Industry Council (Source: progresschamber.org). The organization brands itself as "promoting technology's progressive future" and advocates across what it calls economic, social, and consumer progress.
The organization occupies the same ecosystem niche as trade associations such as the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and NetChoice, with which it frequently aligns on technology-regulation questions, though it distinguishes itself by an explicitly Democratic / center-left orientation rather than a libertarian or cross-partisan one.
Funding and governance
Chamber of Progress is funded by corporate partners but states that partners "do not have a vote on or veto over" its positions and that no partner sits on its board. Its initial 2021 partner roster included Amazon, Google, Facebook (Meta), DoorDash, Uber, Waymo, Instacart, Grubhub, Lime, Zillow, Automattic, Getaround, Wing, and Twitter (Source: progresschamber.org). Coverage of its AI-policy advocacy in 2026 identifies its partners as including Google, Apple, Amazon, and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) (Source: wired.com).
AI-policy positions
Across state-AI episodes, Chamber of Progress has argued that state-by-state AI mandates impose disproportionate compliance costs, threaten in-state tech employment, and lack a workable audit/standards ecosystem — the same operative critique CCIA advanced against Illinois SB 315 ("no credible or standardized ecosystem currently exists to conduct the type of independent audits envisioned").
On Illinois SB 315 (2026) — the first U.S. state law to mandate annual independent third-party safety audits of frontier-AI developers — Chamber of Progress was recorded among the opponents, alongside CCIA, even as frontier labs OpenAI and Anthropic publicly supported the bill (Source: wired.com). The split placed a developer-aligned coalition on the deregulatory side of the frontier labs it counts among adjacent industry interests.
On Virginia HB 2094 (2025), industry-funded compliance-cost estimates attributed to NetChoice / Chamber of Progress (roughly $30M) featured in the debate; consumer advocates produced competing estimates as low as $5M, and Governor Youngkin ultimately vetoed the bill (Source: Raw Sources / Virginia HB 2094 (High-Risk AI Developer and Deployer Act, vetoed)).
Relationships
- regulated-by: — (advocacy organization; not itself regulated)
- contradicts: Illinois SB 315 (frontier safety framework with mandatory third-party audits) (opposed the third-party-audit mandate); Virginia HB 2094 (High-Risk AI Developer and Deployer Act, vetoed) (industry cost-estimate opposition)
- related: AI Federalism, State-Level AI Regulation, CCIA — Computer & Communications Industry Association (frequent ally), NetChoice (frequent ally; create if missing), Reverse Federalism, Google DeepMind, Amazon, Apple, ControlAI
Provenance note. Built from the Chamber of Progress founding announcement (
progresschamber.org) plus secondary coverage of its 2026 AI-bill positions.confidence: medium(2 sources); upgrade as additional state-AI-bill citations accrete.