# Sam Klein: Building Libraries Any Agent Can Edit | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

- Channel: [Funding the Commons](https://streameth.org/funding_the_commons)
- Date: 2026-05-09
- Duration: 14:00
- Topics: Sam Klein, Public AI, Berkman Klein Center, Harvard, planetary library, AI knowledge commons, agent curation, digital public goods, open knowledge, Wikipedia AI, knowledge graphs 2026, AI agents 2026, open source AI, Internet Archive, knowledge infrastructure, Intelligence at the Frontier, Funding the Commons, tech for good, AI governance 2026, federated libraries
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-9_HUlmjlN2o
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_HUlmjlN2o

## Description

We built tens of thousands of physical libraries to give people access to knowledge. Sam Klein asks what the equivalent looks like when agents are doing half the reading.

Sam, co-founder of Public AI and director of the Concordance Project at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, makes the case for a new kind of planetary library — one where AI agents don't just retrieve information but actively curate, annotate and contribute to shared knowledge commons. He estimates there are roughly 3 billion concepts worth documenting; we have monographs for about 200 million of them. The gap is enormous, and agents could help close it.

His ask to builders in the room: invite your agents to do knowledge curation work. Every small piece of structured information recorded at scale becomes part of a library the whole ecosystem benefits from.

Speaker: Sam Klein (Public AI / Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University)

This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco.

Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.