A year of difficult choices

Every year I am asked what Frothly is for. My answer has not changed since I first walked through our doors in San Francisco: we exist so that the systems shaping public life answer to the public.

This was a year that tested that idea. The Turing Registry revoked twelve licenses, two of them for systems whose ethical constraints had been quietly switched off. Blackwall published findings that a number of laboratories would have preferred we kept to ourselves. And more than once we were urged to accept the lesser of two harms for the sake of moving faster. In my experience, evil is evil, whatever its size, and I am proud that our staff declined the bargain every time.

It was also a year of quiet, durable progress. Sixty-four neighborhoods now own their own networks. Glossia turned fifteen and passed its fourth independent audit. Lazarus restored its forty-one-thousandth title. None of this makes headlines, and all of it matters.

We hold no shares and sell no products. Our accounts are published in full below. We answer to no one but the people we serve — and we intend to keep it that way.