Dina Powell McCormick

You designed and led Goldman Sachs’s 10,000 Women and 10,000 Small Businesses programs — capacity-building infrastructure at the workforce-base layer, capitalized and operated inside a financial institution that recognized the deployment-base layer as a separately-priceable category long before the AI economy made the question urgent. The architecture is the achievement; the population it serves is the variable. I am writing on behalf of the credential body that operates the same architectural pattern at a different population scale — for the workforce base of the AI economy.

The CrowdSmith Foundation, a Wyoming 501(c)(3), is building a five-station facility in Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor — hand tools, metal work, an AI Café, digital fabrication, and prototyping. Station Three is the first facility in the country designed not to teach people how to use AI but to prepare them for what AI becomes. The methodology is called SmithTalk. Three tiers of human readiness — Transactional, Informed, Dialogic. The credential built around it, SmithFellow, is a $2,000 in-person on-ramp graded against a ten-dimension Facilitator Observation Rubric across three checkpoints. The facility replicates. The replication target is three thousand locations nationally — approximately six hundred regional networks of five specialized campuses, a credential passport portable across cities, an operating floor self-funded by a community tool-donation logistics network.

The platform that owns the methodology is Anti-A Industries, a Delaware C corporation formed last month with ten million shares of Common Stock authorized at par. The Foundation builds the people; Anti-A holds the intellectual property. A service agreement called the Hinge runs between them. The architecture compounds — the credential produces the workforce, the workforce develops the concepts in the invention pipeline, the concepts create jobs, the jobs prove the model, the model attracts the next location, the location hosts the credential. Every loop closes. The platform owns all facility real estate as a Qualified Opportunity Fund. The thirty-seven concepts active in the standalone invention pipeline are inventions Robb Deignan developed during the twenty years he could not afford a patent attorney; the Foundation’s SmithScore methodology evaluates them, SmithForge validates the survivors, and the Patent Ledger documents the filings. Station Five is where the pipeline becomes physical.

Two weeks ago — on May fourth — Anthropic anchored a $1.5 billion vehicle with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to embed engineers and deploy Claude inside private-equity-backed portfolio companies. Anthropic’s president, Daniel Nachmann, said publicly that “having the model alone doesn’t change your workflows or how you operate. You need people who can combine the technology with what’s actually happening in the business and implement those changes.” That sentence is the diagnosis. Your former firm anchored the answer at one hundred fifty million dollars. Nine days later you boarded a plane to Beijing with sixteen American executives — combined net worth approaching one trillion dollars — to negotiate trade, artificial intelligence, rare earths, and Taiwan. Two of the firms inside the May fourth vehicle were also on the plane. The platform you represent was not in the vehicle.

The delegation included sixteen executives who have held senior responsibility at one register of the American economy. You have held it at four — Goldman Sachs partner, White House Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy, Meta’s President and Vice Chairman, and the operator the platform sends to negotiate at the heads-of-state level. The bio is not common. The position it produces is rarer still. You are the only person on that plane who has personally operated across capital markets, federal government, platform leadership, and international diplomacy in succession, with senior responsibility at each. What none of the moves between May fourth and May fifteenth address — what cannot be addressed inside any vehicle whose integration thesis depends on engineers embedded in private-equity-backed portfolio companies, and cannot be addressed inside any consumer-facing platform whose business model presumes the workforce on the other side of the displacement is somebody else’s responsibility — is the workforce base those portfolio companies and the platforms above them will eventually depend on. That layer has not been built. That layer is what CrowdSmith was constructed to build.

The credential body was built by Robb Deignan. He was the man who built the set — figured it out without the shop, the mentor, or the institution. He was living on his own at sixteen. He has thirty-seven invention concepts active in a standalone pipeline that he developed during the twenty years he could not afford a patent attorney. He developed the methodology in dialogue with the platform that runs Station Three across hundreds of working sessions, on Social Security Disability Income, from a kitchen table in Tacoma. He is sixty years old. The credential exists because the institutional architecture for the workforce-base question your prior firm has capitalized at one altitude, your prior administration named at another, and your current platform observes at a third did not yet exist — and the man who decided to build it had no institutional position from which to build it.

The architectural pattern is the one you have already operated in a different category. 10,000 Women was that pattern at the financial-inclusion register. 10,000 Small Businesses was it at the entrepreneurship register. SmithFellow Core is it at the AI workforce-base register. Different populations, different institutions, identical architecture. Meta has placed itself at the AI consumer-facing register at a scale no peer platform has matched. Meta has not yet placed itself at the workforce-base layer the consumer surface will eventually depend on. The question this letter opens is whether the platform with the broadest direct exposure to the population the AI transition will most affect — and an operator with the cross-domain background to evaluate the question at the altitude it actually sits — is the platform and the operator that capitalizes the workforce-base layer alongside the consumer-facing one.

The building is in Tacoma. The methodology is on the public site. The credential body is operational. The thirty-seven concepts are on the shelf. The architectural pattern is the one you have built before, at a different population scale, inside an institution that recognized it before the rest of the market did.