Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a technical overhaul of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), calling for the use of personal artificial intelligence agents to privately cast votes on behalf of users and help scale digital governance.
The plan, published on social media platform
Instead, individuals would deploy their own AI model, trained on their past messages and stated values, to vote on the thousands of decisions facing DAOs.
“There are many thousands of decisions to be made, involving many domains of expertise, and most people do not have the time or skill to be an expert in even one, let alone all of them.” Buterin wrote. “So what can we do? We use personal LLMs to solve the attention problem.”
First, there is the privacy of the content, which keeps sensitive data confidential. AI agents would operate in secure environments such as multi-party computation (MPC) or trusted execution environments (TEEs), allowing them to process private data without leaking it to the public blockchain.
Secondly, there is the anonymity of the participant. Buterin called for the use of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), a cryptographic tool that allows users to prove their eligibility to vote without revealing their wallet address or how they voted.
This protects against coercion, bribery and whale watching, where smaller voters mimic the decisions of large token holders.
These AI stewards would automate routine board participation and flag only important issues for human review.
To filter out low-quality or spam proposals, an emerging problem as generative AI floods open forums, Buterin suggests launching prediction markets. Here, agents could bet on the likelihood that proposals would be accepted.
Good bets would yield payouts, encouraging valuable contributions and punishing noise.
Buterin also called for privacy-preserving tools such as multi-party computation and trusted execution environments, which would allow AI agents to review sensitive data such as job applications or legal disputes without exposing it on a public blockchain.
Read more: From 2016 hack to $150 million donation: The DAO’s second act focuses on Ethereum security