Buterin Proposes AI Agents to Vote on Behalf of Users in Decentralized Governance

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed using personal AI agents to vote on behalf of users in decentralized governance systems, aiming to reduce the concentration of power among delegates and address one of the core structural limits of DAOs.

Buterin argued that the main barrier to effective decentralized decision-making is not voter participation but human attention, with thousands of proposals spanning multiple technical and economic domains making it difficult for token holders to evaluate each issue.

The proposed system would use large language models trained on an individual's preferences, writings, and past decisions to automatically vote on routine matters while escalating only high-importance or ambiguous proposals for direct input.

This structure would shift governance from simple token-weighted voting toward a model that financially rewards useful contributions and filters large volumes of information before it reaches participants.