From Technical Innovation to the Politics of Artificial Intelligence
By Javier Surasky
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Our AI power map now turns to a different kind of actor, one that plays a leading role in challenging the concentration of technological power in the hands of a few.
AI Now
Institute’s greatest strength, in fact, lies in turning technological concentration into a political problem. Since its creation, it has become one
of the most critical voices in the debate on artificial intelligence, working
to move the conversation away from a view of AI as technical innovation and
toward an approach to digital technologies centered on power, inequality,
surveillance, accountability, regulation, and other issues that fall outside a
purely technological debate.
After years
in which conversations about AI were dominated by promises of efficiency,
growth, and disruption, AI Now insisted on asking who designs these
technologies, who benefits from them, who bears their costs, and which
institutions have the real capacity to control them within an ecosystem marked
by the hiperconcentración of infrastructure, talent, data, and computing power.
Its
relevance lies in its ability to shape the public agenda, challenge dominant
frameworks, and push debates on competition, regulation, rights, and AI
governance. In these spaces, its flagship publication, the Landscape Report,
which analyzes the political evolution of AI, has become a reference point
despite having only two editions: the first, published in 2023 under the title Confronting
Tech Power, focuses on exposing the consequences of concentrated power in
the technology industry; the second, published in 2025 under the title Artificial
Power, analyzes how the expansion of AI products can increase the power of
major technology companies over markets, institutions, and social life itself.
Basic Facts
- AI Now was founded in 2017 by Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker as an independent, nonprofit research institute registered as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States. It was officially launched on November 15 of that year at New York University.
- Its offices are in New York, in partnership with New York University, as part of its network of institutions.
- It is currently led by two executive directors, Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West. Its team includes prominent names, in addition to its founders, such as Meredith Whittaker, Karen Hao, Lucy Suchman, and Veena Dubal.
- It was the first research institute dedicated to studying the social implications of AI, and also the first institute in the field of AI to be founded and led by women.
- In 2021, it was invited to advise the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on AI issues.
- Since mid-2022, it has operated as an independent organization and states that it does not accept corporate funding, including funding from the technology industry it studies.