Too busy to vote? Vitalik Buterin says AI can do it for you!
Private AI agents could change decentralized governance.
What if you never had to vote in a DAO again? That’s the future Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin is imagining.
Instead of users showing up for every proposal, AI agents could step in and vote based on what you actually believe.
AI will vote, so you don’t have to
Buterin recently noted that DAO voting has a serious participation problem, and his solution sounds straight out of the future. Instead of users manually voting on every proposal, he’s proposed letting personal AI agents do the job.
The idea is that each user would have their own AI model, trained on their messages, opinions, and past decisions. This AI would then vote on DAO proposals exactly how the user would.
“Making good decisions often cannot come from a linear process of taking people’s views that are based only on their own information, and averaging them (even quadratically).”
Most people don’t have the time or expertise to vote on thousands of complex decisions. As a result, voting power often ends up concentrated with a few large token holders. Buterin stated,
“The usual solution, delegation, is disempowering”
What’s interesting is that this comes a month after Buterin ripped into DAOs for low participation and growing centralization.
A key part of the idea…
…is making sure users don’t have to give away privacy for convenience.
These AI agents would run inside secure systems, like trusted execution environments and multi-party computation. This would allow them to process sensitive information without exposing it publicly.
To protect voter identity, Buterin suggested using zero-knowledge proofs.
This would let users prove they’re eligible to vote without revealing their wallet address or their decision. It could also reduce risks like bribery, coercion, or blindly copying large token holders.
AI agents could also automatically handle routine votes and alert users only when something important comes up.
To deal with spam proposals, prediction markets are the idea on the table. This is where AI agents would back strong proposals and ignore weak ones.
Final Summary
- Vitalik Buterin’s AI voting proposal could change DAO governance forever.
- If adopted widely, AI agents could make DAOs more scalable and truly decentralized.
