The AI Now Institute is a New York-based research nonprofit founded in 2017 that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence, with a focus on corporate and state concentrations of power, labor displacement, surveillance, and civil-rights impacts. It is associated with the AI ethics and critical-AI tradition, which predated and remains in tension with the existential-risk-focused AI safety tradition.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | 501(c)(3) research nonprofit |
| Headquarters | New York, NY |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Founders | Kate Crawford, Meredith Whittaker |
| Current leadership | Sarah Myers West and Amba Kak (co-executive directors) |
| Known for | Critical AI research on labor, civil rights, corporate power, environmental impact, and accountability |
Overview
AI Now conducts research on the social implications of artificial intelligence, with an explicit focus on concentrations of corporate and state power, labor displacement, surveillance, and civil-rights impacts.
The institute was founded in 2017 at NYU by Kate Crawford, then at Microsoft Research and NYU, and Meredith Whittaker, then at Google Open Research. In 2018 and 2019 Whittaker became a public figure through her role organizing the Google Walkout over the Maven contract and the company's harassment policies, and AI Now became a prominent academic voice on worker power in tech. From 2020 to 2022 the institute published annual reports and advocated for algorithmic accountability legislation at state and federal levels. In 2022 Whittaker became president of the Signal Foundation, and Sarah Myers West and Amba Kak took over AI Now's leadership. From 2023 to 2026 the institute expanded its critique of generative AI, of concentration in frontier AI, and of the "AI safety" frame, arguing that the latter crowds out civil-rights and labor-power concerns.
Activities
AI Now's published work includes its annual AI Now reports, issued from 2017 to the present, covering labor, civil rights, surveillance, and accountability; analyses of generative-AI concentration, compute, and environmental impact; and contributions to New York state and city algorithmic accountability legislation, including the broader ecosystem around NYC Local Law 144.
On June 19, 2026, AI Now's Sarah Myers West told the Senate Banking Committee that a "bailout" of major AI developers was already underway and urged lawmakers to scrutinize public support for the industry (Source: insideaipolicy.com).
Positions
AI Now has argued that the central AI policy problem is the concentration of capability, compute, and data in a small number of private firms, rather than speculative future autonomous agents. Its work foregrounds labor power — worker organizing, collective bargaining, and whistleblower protections — and treats civil rights as a first-order concern, emphasizing bias audits, algorithmic accountability, and disparate-impact analysis.
AI Now researchers have publicly criticized the existential-risk-focused AI safety community for crowding out civil-rights concerns and for being aligned with the interests of frontier AI companies. The institute has also criticized voluntary frameworks, including the Frontier Model Forum (FMF) and the Seoul Commitments, and light-touch transparency regimes, as industry-friendly forms of "AI governance" that entrench incumbents.
In this respect AI Now sits in tension with existential-risk-focused actors such as Center for AI Safety (CAIS), Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), and Anthropic-adjacent safety institutions. Civil-society groups aligned with AI Now often make the same policy demands on transparency and disclosure as safety-focused groups, but from different underlying framings.
People
- Meredith Whittaker — co-founder; now President of the Signal Foundation, and a prominent public voice.
- Sarah Myers West — co-executive director; author on tech accountability and antitrust.
- Amba Kak — co-executive director; former advisor to the FTC.
- Kate Crawford — co-founder; author of Atlas of AI; continues affiliation.
Funding and governance
AI Now is funded by foundations, including Ford, Luminate, MacArthur, and Open Society, among others, and by university grants. It is not part of the Open Philanthropy and effective-altruism-adjacent funding network that anchors most existential-risk-focused AI organizations, a difference in funder base that has been linked to its divergent framing from the existential-risk camp.
Relationships
- related: Brookings Institution AI Initiative — overlapping concern with AI equity and civil rights, different tradition
- contradicts: Center for AI Safety (CAIS), Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) — divergent framings of where the central AI risk lies
- related: AI Copyright Litigation — Analysis — adjacent civil-rights framing
- related: AI Safety Cases and Frameworks — AI Now has criticized voluntary frameworks
- related: Partnership on AI (PAI) — parallel multi-stakeholder body, different posture
Notes
No primary AI Now source is currently in the wiki; this page is synthesized from the organization's public footprint. Confidence medium pending source ingest.