AI Now Institute

The AI Now Institute is a New York City-based nonprofit research and policy organization whose central focus is the concentration of power in the AI industry, the rights of workers subject to algorithmic management, and the conditions under which AI systems can be made democratically accountable. Founded at New York University in November 2017 by Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker, the Institute became an independent nonprofit in 2022, severing its university home and adopting a policy of accepting no funding from technology companies. The current co-executive directors are Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West. The Institute's annual landscape reports, congressional testimony, and policy advisory work are calibrated for community organizers, policymakers, and the general public rather than primarily for academic audiences — a deliberate positioning that makes it a movement infrastructure organization as much as a research center.

Founding and structural history

The Institute launched on November 15, 2017 at NYU, described at the time as the first university research institute focused on the social implications of AI and the first such institute founded and led by women. Crawford was NYU Distinguished Research Professor and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research; Whittaker was NYU Distinguished Research Scientist and founder of Google's Open Research group. The founding premise was that AI was being applied at speed to high-stakes public decisions — hiring, policing, healthcare, credit determinations — with almost no independent research capacity tracking the effects on affected communities.

The Institute's structure changed significantly in 2022. Whittaker left to become the first president of the Signal Foundation; Crawford's active directorial role wound down. The Institute simultaneously moved to full legal independence from NYU and established its no-corporate-funding policy — refusing grants and donations from technology companies whose products and practices its research examines. Amba Kak, who had joined the Institute in 2019 as director of global policy and programs (having previously served as Global Policy Advisor at Mozilla and as a legal advisor to India's telecommunications regulator on net-neutrality policy), was named co-executive director in September 2022 alongside Sarah Myers West. Kak was included on the TIME 100 AI list in 2024 as one of the year's most influential people shaping AI governance. The Institute is now funded by the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Omidyar Network/Luminate, and the MacArthur Foundation, with grants structured to support broad research goals rather than earmarked to specific project outcomes.

Annual landscape reports

The Institute's most widely circulated output is its annual landscape report series, published continuously since 2017 and used as a reference document across civil society, government, and journalism. Each report synthesizes the legal, economic, technical, and labor dimensions of AI's trajectory into a single public-facing diagnosis, explicitly addressed to policymakers, advocates, community organizers, and the general public rather than primarily to academic readers. The 2025 report, titled Artificial Power, focused on how the accelerating push to integrate AI into every sector of the economy functions as a mechanism for concentrating power in a small number of technology corporations and their owners. The report moved explicitly beyond diagnosis, offering concrete strategies — structural antitrust intervention, worker organizing, regulatory bright-line rules, and a "zero trust" posture toward AI industry self-regulation — for the audiences it addresses. The 2023 Landscape Report, Confronting Tech Power, established the power-concentration frame that the 2025 report built on. The full report archive runs from 2017 through the present and constitutes one of the most sustained public annual diagnostics of AI's trajectory from a public-interest perspective in the US.

Policy engagement and congressional testimony

The Institute functions as a sustained conduit between movement research and government processes in the US and internationally. Amba Kak regularly advises members of Congress, the White House, the European Commission, UK government, the City of New York, and US and international regulatory agencies, and has testified multiple times before Congress on AI policy. Institute Senior Fellow Dr. Katie J. Wells testified before the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections in June 2026 on gig nursing platforms and algorithmic management — illustrating the Institute's consistent focus on how AI-enabled labor precarity affects workers well outside the technology sector. The Institute's research has been cited in Federal Trade Commission AI reports and state-level automated-decision-systems legislation, and its policy positions have informed civil-society submissions to EU AI Act negotiations.

Posture in the movement

The AI Now Institute occupies a distinctive position in the make-AI-good movement as a US-based organization whose primary function is equipping non-researcher audiences — community organizers, workers, and lawmakers — with structural analysis they can use in campaigns, hearings, and legislative processes. Its refusal of corporate funding is both a research-integrity choice and a movement signal: the Institute positions itself unambiguously on the side of workers and the public rather than as a neutral technical broker between the industry and its critics. Where the Algorithmic Justice League works primarily through participatory research, cultural production, and public-facing auditing campaigns, AI Now's engagement lever is the annual landscape report and policy testimony, calibrated for the policymaker and organizer audience. The 2025 Artificial Power framing — AI concentration as an oligarchic power problem requiring structural political intervention — represents the sharpest power-critique from a US-based source in the corpus, and its worker-organizing and antitrust recommendations link its research directly to the labor and political-economy threads running through the broader movement.