Tech Transparency Project

The Tech Transparency Project is a Washington, DC-based investigative research initiative of Campaign for Accountability — a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan nonprofit watchdog — launched in 2016 as the Google Transparency Project and rebranded in March 2020 to reflect its expansion across all major technology sectors including AI. TTP holds technology companies accountable through original investigative research using FOIA litigation, tax filings, SEC records, and lobbying disclosures, producing findings that feed into media coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News, and into congressional and regulatory action. The director is Katie Paul, an anthropologist and investigative researcher recognized as a 2025 DC Tech Titan by Washingtonian.

Institutional structure and founding

Campaign for Accountability was co-founded in May 2015 by Anne Weismann, former chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Louis Mayberg, former CREW chairman. The watchdog model they built — original research, litigation, and strategic communications to expose misconduct — carried directly into TTP's operation. The initiative began with a database of 258 revolving-door personnel moves between Google and the Obama-era federal government, establishing the FOIA-driven public-records methodology that now anchors TTP's AI investigations. A FOIA archive holding 43,000+ pages of government-industry correspondence underpins the work.

TTP receives no corporate donations. Listed funders include the Bohemian Foundation, Kapor Center, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Reset Tech, Open Society Foundations, Skoll Foundation, and individual donor David Magerman.

AI conflicts-of-interest investigations

TTP's most consequential AI work is a continuing investigation into how AI-industry principals leverage government positions, defense advisory roles, and philanthropic structures to steer policy toward their private financial interests.

The anchor is the Eric Schmidt series. An April 2024 investigation used FOIA-obtained emails, tax filings, and SEC records to document that Schmidt — while chairing the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and publicly warning Congress of China's AI threat — had invested $17 million through his foundation into Gaoling Feeder Ltd, a fund managed by Hillhouse Capital with extensive holdings in Chinese AI companies developing surveillance and facial-recognition technology. FOIA-obtained emails showed Schmidt Futures staff asking National Security Commission government employees to arrange personal meetings with Chinese AI industry figures during a November 2019 China trip, raising potential violations of the ethics rules governing Special Government Employees prohibiting use of official time for private purposes.

A companion investigation, "Eric Schmidt's Expanding Influence Apparatus," documented Schmidt's placement of at least 24 fellows in key federal positions — spanning the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the FTC, OMB, GSA, and the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce — via the Federation of American Scientists Day One Project and the Intergovernmental Personnel Act Mobility Program. The positions documented tracked Schmidt's private AI investment portfolio, creating the conditions for conflicts of interest across agencies involved in AI research funding, procurement, and regulatory oversight.

"Inside Palantir's Expanding Influence Operation" traced the revolving door between Palantir and the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office — the unit controlling military AI procurement. Former government officials placed at Palantir reinforce a self-serving narrative that China's AI threat requires increased Pentagon purchases from private AI contractors. Palantir's lobbying spending grew from $1 million in 2016 to approximately $5.8 million in 2024, regularly exceeding established defense contractors, while the company established the Palantir Foundation for Defense Policy and International Affairs in 2023 to fund research and conferences on national security and AI aligned with its commercial interests.

Academic capture and Big Tech political influence

TTP has extended its conflict-of-interest methodology to AI policy's academic layer. An investigation into a Silicon Valley congressional representative's AI academic roundtable found it was dominated by academics with undisclosed financial ties to major technology companies — the same structural dynamic TTP documented with Google's university funding relationships, which the Washington Post covered in December 2023 as "Big Tech Funds the Very People Who Are Supposed to Hold It Accountable," drawing substantially on TTP research. Separate reporting tracked "Google Finds Workaround for Lobbying That Omits Big Bosses" (August 2025), revealing strategies through which tech executives maintain regulatory influence while nominally stepping back from formal lobbying disclosure.

Impact and reach

TTP has produced 207+ published reports generating more than 1,200 media coverage instances. Platform policy changes at Meta and YouTube — including child safety, advertising, and content recommendation restrictions — have been documented as downstream outcomes. Congressional references to TTP research have appeared in committee proceedings; Senator Jon Ossoff pressed Apple and Google on deepfake nudification applications using TTP's reporting. The research has contributed to federal and state legislative scrutiny of AI industry political influence and to Senator Elizabeth Warren's questions to the Department of Defense about former Google CEO conflicts of interest on defense advisory boards.