Audrey Tang

Audrey Tang (born 1981) is a self-taught programmer and free-software legend who dropped out of school at 14, contributed foundationally to the Perl community, and in 2016 became Taiwan’s first digital minister — the world’s first openly nonbinary cabinet official. After leaving the ministry in 2024, Tang became Taiwan’s cyber ambassador-at-large, carrying a distinctive message to the AI debate: the choice is not between accelerating AI and stopping it, but between AI that supercharges conflict and AI that helps people cooperate.

Alignment by assembly

In 2023 Tang partnered with the Collective Intelligence Project to launch “Alignment Assemblies” — deliberative mini-publics in which ordinary Taiwanese citizens, convened with the help of AI-assisted tools like Polis, set the guardrails for how AI should behave and be governed in Taiwan. Rather than leaving alignment to labs, Tang argued in the RSA Journal in 2024 that a democratic approach — as opposed to a technocratic one — is the optimal answer to what is an ethical, political and societal conundrum, and that the power to shape AI should not be exclusive to a handful of companies or economies.

With economist E. Glen Weyl, Tang co-authored “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy” (2024), an open-source book arguing that technologies including AI can widen democracy’s bandwidth rather than erode it. Tang points to Taiwan — a polity under constant information attack — as proof: crowdsourced fact-checking, civic hacking, and AI-assisted deliberation have made its democracy more resilient, not less. Tang has advised governments and labs worldwide, including collaborations with Anthropic and OpenAI on citizen input into model behavior.