Project Liberty Institute is a nonprofit research and policy institute founded by telecoms and real-estate investor Frank McCourt as part of the broader Project Liberty initiative. As framed in its own materials, its mission is to develop civic architecture, policy, and research that returns "ownership and control" of digital identity and data to users, with particular emphasis on platform governance, content authenticity, and generative AI.
Activities
The Institute funds the Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, which Florence G'sell directs. Its support is acknowledged in Regulating Under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (G'sell, 2024) as what "made this report possible."
The Institute's broader program includes its involvement in the McCourt-led bid to acquire TikTok in 2024–2025. That program reflects a user-sovereignty-adjacent view of platform governance, under which users should own their social graphs and data, moving toward protocols and away from centralized platforms.
Positions
Project Liberty positions itself on the pro-user-agency, pro-decentralization side of platform governance debates. Its funding choices, including Stanford Cyber Policy Center work on platform and AI governance and civic architecture research, align with a vision in which platform incumbents are treated skeptically, decentralized protocols and data portability are preferred design goals, and AI governance is viewed through a democratic-control rather than frontier-capability lens.
This positioning is adjacent to but distinct from First Amendment–focused user-sovereignty arguments and from the AI-safety community's frontier-capability focus.
Relationships
- funds: Stanford Cyber Policy Center's Program on Governance of Emerging Technologies (directed by Florence G'sell)
- related: Stanford Cyber Policy Center; User Sovereignty Model vs. Public Safety / Social Justice Model (thematic adjacency, not formal endorsement); Frank McCourt's TikTok acquisition bid (context for the broader Project Liberty initiative — not separately tracked)
See also
- Regulating Under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (G'sell, 2024) — the report Project Liberty funded
- Florence G'sell — principal investigator on the funded program