What unites the list more than any title or office is a shared focus on artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future. Asked on a registration form to predict the future, registrants repeatedly returned to the same theme: that AI will reshape work, war, education, and belief within a few years. Several foresee mass layoffs and a backsliding on unions and government programs; others predict an “AI winter,” domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or a religious revival fueled by disruption.
“The collapse of society,” predicted another, “will continue to intensify.”
Members also list talents such as “funhouse building,” accent impersonation, backcountry skiing, urban exploration, and “meditative and intellectual inquiry into the nature of reality”; one offers “compassion and existential dread,” another “dinner parties, keeping secrets, remembering birthdays.” Their book recommendations lean toward the canonical and progressive, Marcus Aurelius and Milan Kundera alongside Annie Duke. Thinking About BettingPeter Attia Living outsideand, at least one attendee, Thiel’s Zero to one.
The box also plays the match. Its participant form asks registrants if they are “looking for love” and promises to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matches.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app billed as “helpful communication for special people.”
The form also collects sensitive responses, including the “political leanings” of each subscriber, which the Interview promises ” WILL NOT be shared in the application or with other participants. That data, and matching responses, were exposed in the leak.
Records reside on Airtable, a commercial database. For each participant, the dialog box includes membership status, all vacations the person has taken, biography, hometown, and private access token. WIRED does not publish the tokens, which serve as login credentials, or the personal account links they contain.
The leaked directory also names top figures not on the 113 public directory: Randy Kroszner, a former Federal Reserve governor who now serves on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee; Hallie Hoffman, former general counsel and acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League; Peter Goettler, president of the Cato Institute; Ryan Stowers, executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation; and Roger Myerson, a Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago.
It also lists a group of Google and Google DeepMind executives, among them Tom Lue, who leads global affairs in the company’s AI division, and one active journalist, Souad Mekhennet, national security reporter for The Washington Post. (He is listed as hosting an event called the “Ulysses Book Club.”)
Other memberships include hedge fund and private equity billionaires, current and former foreign dignitaries, network television personalities, best-selling authors, and religious leaders.
One of the few internal documents The Box left exposed on the same online database that holds its registration records is a guide for event moderators, urging them to remind participants that everything is “off the record” and that comments should be brief and “inconspicuous.” It also trains them to model short “avoid signing status” presentations to a room full of senators, dignitaries, and dignitaries.
