Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed technical reforms to the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), calling for the use of personal artificial intelligence agents to vote privately on behalf of users to help expand the scale of digital governance.
The plan, unveiled on social media platform
Instead, individuals will deploy their own AI models, trained based on their past information and established values, to vote on the thousands of decisions facing the DAO.
“Thousands of decisions need to be made, spanning many areas of expertise, and most people don’t have the time or skills to become experts in even one of them, let alone all of them,” Buterin wrote. “So what can we do? We use personal LLMs to address attention issues.”
The first is content privacy, ensuring sensitive data remains confidential. AI agents will run in secure environments such as multi-party computation (MPC) or trusted execution environments (TEE), allowing them to process private data without leaking it to the public blockchain.
Second is the anonymity of the participants. Buterin called for the use of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), a cryptographic tool that allows users to prove they are eligible to vote without revealing their wallet address or how they voted.
This prevents coercion, bribery, and whale watching, where small voters imitate the decisions of large token holders.
These AI administrators will automate daily governance engagement and flag only critical issues for human review.
To filter out low-quality or spam proposals—a new problem emerging as generative AI floods open forums—Buterin suggests launching prediction markets. In these, agents can bet on the likelihood of a proposal being accepted.
Good bets pay off, incentivizing valuable contributions while punishing noise.
Buterin also called for the use of privacy-preserving tools such as multi-party computation and trusted execution environments to enable AI agents to evaluate sensitive data, such as job applications or legal disputes, without exposing it to a public blockchain.
Read more: From 2016 hack to $150M donation: The DAO’s second act focuses on Ethereum security
