Maria Cantwell

My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing to you on behalf of a man named Robb Deignan, who is building something in your state, in your city, on a corridor you have already legislated for.

You are ranked eight on a list of one hundred forty-seven people receiving this letter. The ranking is based on proximity. Yours is the highest proximity of any member of Congress on this list, because the building I am about to describe sits in Tacoma, Washington, inside Census Tract 62400—a federally designated Opportunity Zone in your state, under your legislative jurisdiction, eight miles from your district office on Pacific Avenue.

You were the first person in your family to graduate from college. Pell Grants opened the door. A federal program designed to give people access to institutions they could not otherwise afford changed the direction of your life. CrowdSmith serves the same population—people with capability and drive who lack institutional access. The difference is that CrowdSmith does not require enrollment in a four-year university. It requires walking through a door.

The CrowdSmith Foundation is a 501(c)(3) building a five-station maker facility on the East Portland Avenue corridor in Tacoma. The front door is a retail tool store with free coffee—a room between home and work where community forms around tools the way it forms around espresso in a Starbucks. Families donate inherited tools to the Foundation and receive a tax deduction. Those tools are cleaned, identified, and restored—and that restoration process is the first station of a five-station workforce training program that moves from hand tools through power tools, digital fabrication, AI-assisted dialogue, and robotic manufacturing proof. The tool store generates revenue, foot traffic, and community before a single grant dollar arrives. Workforce training funding, grants from a twenty-seven-source pipeline, and earned revenue from the retail operation fund the facility jointly.

In February 2026, you co-introduced the Small Business Artificial Intelligence Training Act, directing the Department of Commerce and the SBA to create AI training resources for small businesses. Station Four of this facility—the AI Café—is the physical room where that training happens. A proprietary three-tier methodology called SmithTalk teaches participants to work with AI systems at increasing levels of sophistication, from basic prompting through sustained collaborative dialogue. The credential tracks that run through the five stations map to roles on an invention team. Forty-four invention concepts have been evaluated through the same methodology. No equity taken. No licensing rights retained.

You sponsored the Puyallup Tribe of Indians Land Into Trust Confirmation Act. The Puyallup Tribal Enterprises headquarters are on the same corridor where CrowdSmith is siting its facility. The legislative connection is direct.

Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He grew up in a working-class family. He was living on his own at sixteen. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry and sold over ten thousand membership contracts, every one face-to-face. He built the entire institutional architecture of this project—a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven integrated financial models with over seven hundred formulas, and a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline—through hundreds of working sessions of sustained human-AI collaboration.

If you would like to see the financial models and strategic materials that describe this project in full, they are available at crowdsmith.org/partners. An access code will be provided on request.

A Pell Grant opened a door for a girl from Indianapolis. This building is designed to open a door for the people on Portland Avenue who never had one. It is in your state. It is in your city. It is on a corridor you have already legislated for. I am writing to let you know it exists.