Project Liberty is building the identity and data governance layer that AI agents require to operate as personal assistants. In the current ecosystem, agents are often tethered to the proprietary data silos of big tech companies. If an agent only has access to a user's data within a specific walled garden, its utility is limited and its loyalty is divided between the user and the platform.
By advocating for and building DSNP, Project Liberty provides a mechanism for sovereign identity. This allows developers to build agents that can move with the user across different services and applications. In the agent stack, Project Liberty sits at the infrastructure and identity layer, championing the idea that for agents to be truly effective for the user, the underlying social and data graphs must be decentralized and user-controlled.
Project Liberty is an intervention in the internet's structural design. Founded in 2019 by civic entrepreneur Frank McCourt with a $500 million commitment, the organization operates on the premise that the current model of the web—where data and social graphs are owned by a few private platforms—is incompatible with a healthy society and the coming age of AI. Instead of building a single competing app, the team is building the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). This is an open-source technical standard that allows social connections to exist on a shared, public ledger rather than inside a private database controlled by a corporation.
The project is structured to address both the technical and social requirements of this shift. It is divided into two primary arms: Project Liberty Labs and the Project Liberty Institute. The Labs side is the engineering hub, led by Braxton Woodham, a co-founder of Fandango. This team focuses on the development of DSNP and the surrounding infrastructure needed to make decentralized data practical for developers. Their goal is to create a common rail for the internet, similar to how HTTP or SMTP functions, where no single entity controls the underlying network of relationships.
The Project Liberty Institute handles the policy and academic side of the mission. It maintains a network of partners including Georgetown University, Stanford University, and Sciences Po. This arm is led by Tomicah Tillemann and focuses on designing sustainable data governance models. By involving academic and civic leaders, the organization ensures that the transition to decentralized infrastructure is grounded in legal frameworks that protect individual rights rather than just shareholder interests.
The organization’s focus has increasingly shifted toward how these protocols interact with AI. In a web dominated by large language models and autonomous agents, the question of who owns the data used to train and inform these systems is paramount. Project Liberty argues that without a decentralized identity layer, AI agents will simply become another tool for platform lock-in. If a user’s history, preferences, and social connections are portable via DSNP, they can authorize an AI agent to act on their behalf without the agent being controlled by the platform where the data was generated.
In 2024, Project Liberty gained significant attention for its proposal to acquire TikTok. The bid was not just a financial transaction but a technical one, intended to migrate the app's core architecture to DSNP. This would turn one of the world's largest social platforms into an open protocol, demonstrating the scale of the organization's ambitions. They are attempting to buy their way into a position where they can force a migration to a more open web. The effort is supported by an advisory board that includes Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and various civic leaders, which indicates a broad coalition of support for a post-platform internet architecture.
An open-source protocol for a shared social graph that uncouples identity from private platforms.
Project Liberty is hiring.