The Foundation for American Innovation is a center-right technology-policy think tank led by president and CEO Zach Graves. It began as the Lincoln Network, a Bay Area libertarian-leaning advocacy group founded to connect Silicon Valley technologists with conservative governance, and rebranded as FAI as it professionalized into a Washington research-and-policy organization. Its self-described mission is to "bridge the divide" between the technology industry and government, with work spanning emerging-technology policy, defense modernization, energy, and government capacity. (Source: influencewatch.org; thefai.org)
Overview and positioning
FAI is described as one of the institutional homes of the "tech right" — the policy current that combines skepticism of broad-brush technology regulation with hawkishness on China and support for state capacity in defense and energy. Inc. profiled it as a once-"obscure Bay Area libertarian advocacy group" now "shaping the tech-right" and influencing federal energy policy (Source: inc.com). The Inc. profile attributes to FAI reach into the current administration's technology-policy appointments and the Republican congressional staff network.
FAI's broader portfolio is light-touch on model regulation, hawkish on China, and supportive of buildout in energy and compute, aligning with the administration-aligned side of the debates on AI Federalism and AI Industry Lobbying — The 2025-2026 Political Offensive.
Activities
On June 3, 2026, FAI co-organized the ScreenDNA Open Letter with the Institute for Progress, with Graves named as FAI's organizing principal. The letter calls on Congress to make screening of synthetic DNA/RNA orders and synthesis equipment mandatory, with recordkeeping for traceability. The screening ask is framed as a narrow physical-chokepoint control that does not depend on any particular view of AI risk. The letter places a deregulatory-leaning think tank in the position of organizing for a mandate. See AI Biosecurity.
FAI also pressed for disclosure of the White House frontier AI evaluation framework, filing a Freedom of Information Act request for the document on August 5, 2026. The framework, completed under the June 2, 2026 cyber executive order, offers developers up to 30 days of voluntary pre-deployment government review of their models' cybersecurity capabilities, and the administration does not plan to publish its details (Source: newsletter.safe.ai). See AI Pre-Release Vetting.
FAI and other amici filed a brief, with Tim Hwang on the brief, supporting Anthropic in its D.C. Circuit petitions for review of the Department of War's exclusion of Claude under 41 U.S.C. § 4713; the court denied the petitions on September 25, 2026 (Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War — D.C. Circuit Opinion, Nos. 26-1049 and 26-1162 (September 25, 2026); Anthropic v. United States (Pentagon ban challenge)).
Relationships
- supports: An Open Letter in Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Recordkeeping (June 2026) (co-organizer), AI Biosecurity (mandatory-screening policy lane)
- related: AI Pre-Release Vetting (FOIA request for the White House evaluation framework), Institute for Progress (IFP) (ScreenDNA co-organizer; the abundance-progressive counterpart in the coalition), Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) (adjacent but distinct current on the tech right), AI Industry Lobbying — The 2025-2026 Political Offensive
Sources
2 supporting sources (InfluenceWatch; Inc. profile) plus FAI's own site and the ScreenDNA ingest. Created by the 2026-06-05 gap scan: flagged in the 2026-06-04 lint report as a missing entity (ScreenDNA co-organizer with no page) and carried on the 2026-06-04 gap-scan deferred backlog. FAI primary documents on the federalism and lobbying threads have not yet been ingested.