Humans First is a US advocacy group opposing the buildout of AI data centers. It was incorporated in California in January 2026 by Center for AI Safety managing director Oliver Zhang and CAIS special project associate Arunim Agarwal, launched publicly in March 2026 as a nonpartisan organization with separate left and right coalitions, and rebranded in April 2026 as a conservative organization chaired by Amy Kremer (Source: transformernews.ai).
Origins and structure
Kremer helped procure the permit for the rally preceding the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots and was a leader of the modern-day Tea Party. In a profile published August 13, 2026 she described the group's strategy as organizing conservatives against AI companies: "Big Tech has all the money. They bought off everybody in Washington DC... But what they cannot buy off is the people." She said Humans First has not yet repaid an initial loan from CAIS and declined to state the organization's size (Source: transformernews.ai).
The founding arrangement places the group's origins inside an AI-safety research organization and its present leadership in movement conservatism, with the financial relationship between the two still open. The March-to-April shift from a two-coalition nonpartisan structure to a single conservative one narrowed the organization's stated base within three months of launch.
Activities
On July 18, 2026 Humans First organized protests in at least 125 locations across the United States — the first coordinated national effort against the AI data-center buildout; Reuters put the final count at 142 protests across 42 states (Source: yahoo.com; reuters.com). The group targets what it calls an "unaccountable" expansion, citing towns that approved data-center projects under nondisclosure agreements between local officials and developers (Source: yahoo.com).
The organization announced an anti-data-center bus tour for September 2026 (Source: transformernews.ai).
Position in the AI-policy landscape
Humans First organizes on siting, land use and local approval processes rather than on the catastrophic-risk framing that motivates its founders' parent organization, and it recruits from a constituency that AI-safety advocacy has not historically reached. The resulting configuration — safety-organization founders, conservative movement leadership, and an infrastructure-siting agenda — cuts across the usual alignment of positions described at Public Opinion on AI, where opposition to data centers has more often been organized locally and without national partisan framing.
Relationships
- instance-of: AI Backlash — organized public opposition to AI infrastructure
- related: Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics — protests target local approval processes, including NDA-gated deals
- related: Center for AI Safety (CAIS) — incorporated by CAIS staff and initially financed by a CAIS loan
- related: Public Opinion on AI, AI Data Centers