Lauren Wagner is a researcher, operator and investor creating new markets for trustworthy technology.
She is currently a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Technical & AI Policy Advisor to the Data & Trust Alliance, and an angel investor in startups with a trust & safety edge, particularly AI-driven solutions for regulated markets.
As a Senior Advisor to Responsible Innovation Labs, Lauren developed the first AI governance framework for startups and venture capitalists, collaborating with key stakeholders like General Catalyst, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. This work garnered a formal endorsement from U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and 200+ industry signatories. Her efforts to advance responsible technology development have been featured in CNBC, Bloomberg, Axios, Politico and Tech Policy Press.
Previously, Lauren was an early-stage investor at Link Ventures, an MIT-affiliated fund, and held senior product roles at Meta. There, she led product strategy and go-to-market initiatives aimed at mitigating online harms, including misinformation, election integrity, and explicit content. Notably, she helped spreadhead the US 2020 Election Research Project, with findings published in Science and Nature, and social network research covered by The New York Times. Lauren built cross-functional teams, launched impactful products, pioneered governance models for data sharing, and represented Meta in industry-wide working groups.
At Google, she led global developer marketing for the Google Assistant (now Gemini) cultivating a community of engineers that created thousands of AI chatbots with TensorFlow. Earlier in her career, she built digital health startups, like Truveris, and worked for Telefonica’s innovation division, developing new mobile products for one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies in Europe and Latin America.
Lauren holds advanced degrees from the University of Oxford's Internet Institute and Cornell University, with a focus on network analysis and human-computer interaction.