Foxglove

Foxglove is a London-based non-profit that uses investigation, strategic litigation, and public campaigning to hold governments, public bodies, and large technology companies accountable for the way they design and deploy digital systems. The organisation's central premise is that decisions made or shaped by software should be open, fair, and lawful — and that those affected by those decisions, rather than only the institutions deploying them, should have a meaningful say in how the technology is built and used.

Foxglove was founded in 2019 by Martha Dark, Cori Crider, and Rosa Curling, and is incorporated as Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company. Dark, an operations and tech-rights specialist, had previously been head of operations at Reprieve and chief operating officer of the Open Rights Group; Crider is a US-qualified lawyer who had directed Reprieve's national-security team; Curling is a UK-qualified public-law and human-rights lawyer formerly with Leigh Day. The three came together with the aim of building a small, independent organisation that could combine the litigation rigour of a public-interest law firm with the campaigning instincts of a movement organisation.

Structure and current leadership

Foxglove operates as a Community Interest Company — a UK structure for social-purpose organisations whose assets are locked to a stated mission — and is run from London. It is led by co-Executive Directors Martha Dark and Rosa Curling, with co-founder Cori Crider stepping back from her directorship in September 2024 after five years to join the Open Markets Institute and the Future of Tech Institute as a Senior Fellow focused on antimonopoly policy; she subsequently joined Foxglove's Advisory Council. Donald Campbell serves as Director of Advocacy, with Alix Dunn as a Non-Executive Director. The wider team is small and includes a Head of Legal, a Head of Communications, a Head of Strategy, and a network of senior fellows and consultants spanning campaigning, design, and operations. In 2025 Foxglove appointed Dan Hartford as South Africa Lead, overseeing the organisation's expansion into challenging hyperscale data centre development in the Global South.

The organisation's published accounts for the year to 30 June 2024 list grant funding from the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Baring Foundation, and the Barrow Cadbury Trust, among other supporters. Foxglove publishes its full funder list openly on its website and in its filings, which is unusual for an organisation of its size and which reflects its broader posture on transparency around digital decision-making.

Approach and tactics

Foxglove's areas of work cluster into four programs: algorithmic justice (challenging unfair use of automated decision-making by public bodies and platforms), tech worker power (supporting content moderators, drivers, and other front-line tech workers organising for safer conditions), big-tech accountability (investigation and litigation against the largest platforms), and a campaign to protect NHS patient data for the public good. From 2025, the big-tech accountability program expanded significantly to encompass the environmental and community harms of hyperscale data centre construction — Foxglove brought the UK's first judicial challenge to a government-approved hyperscale data centre, and by 2026 extended that work to South Africa — and an international legal challenge to Google's practice of using news publishers' content without compensation to power its AI Overview search summaries. The unifying method is a sequence — investigate, litigate, campaign — in which a deeply researched legal challenge is paired with public-facing campaign infrastructure (open letters, petitions, MP-letter tools, journalism partnerships) so that the case shifts public discourse as well as the legal record.

The organisation works through partnership rather than as a standalone law firm. Most cases are brought on behalf of, or alongside, affected individuals and frontline organisations: the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants on the visa case, the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People on the DWP fraud algorithm, an A-level student on the Ofqual case, Kenyan content moderators on the Meta cases. Foxglove's role is to bring legal capacity, communications support, and a sustained campaigning infrastructure to causes whose own organising base would not otherwise be able to litigate at this scale.

Notable cases and outcomes

In August 2020 — barely a year after the organisation was founded — Foxglove and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants forced the Home Office to withdraw its visa-application "streaming tool", an algorithm that sorted applicants into red/amber/green risk bands and that civil-society analysts argued discriminated on the basis of nationality. Foxglove describes the outcome as the first successful judicial review of a UK government algorithmic decision-making system. The same month, Foxglove represented Curtis Parfitt-Ford, an A-level student at a comprehensive school in Ealing, in challenging Ofqual's algorithmic grade-prediction system; within days the government reversed course and accepted teachers' assessed grades, in what came to be known publicly as the "fk-the-algorithm" episode after the slogan that appeared on placards at student protests.

Foxglove subsequently turned its algorithmic-justice work toward the welfare system. From December 2021 onward, the organisation has supported the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People in a long-running judicial review of the Department for Work and Pensions' "General Matching Service" — an algorithm used to flag Universal Credit claimants for fraud investigation. Through that case the DWP has been compelled to disclose previously secret information about how the algorithm works; in February 2024, Neil Couling, the DWP's Change and Resilience Director General, acknowledged on the record that the system contained bias. A May 2025 update summarised what Foxglove and GMCDP had been able to extract about the algorithm's design, with Foxglove concluding the algorithm does not appear to make directly adverse decisions about individual claimants but should have been disclosed publicly before deployment.

Foxglove's largest body of work outside the UK has been with Kenyan Facebook content moderators, working with Kenyan firm Nzili and Sumbi Advocates and US litigator Mercy Mutemi on the cases brought by Daniel Motaung (alleging unlawful exploitation, mental-health harm, and union-busting) and by 185 former content moderators challenging their mass dismissal. In September 2024 the Nairobi Court of Appeal rejected Meta's jurisdictional appeal, allowing both cases to proceed to trial in Kenya. By the end of 2024, more than 140 of the moderators had been diagnosed with PTSD and other mental-health conditions; Foxglove and its partners have used the cases to argue that the platforms ultimately commissioning content-moderation labour are responsible for the conditions in which it is performed.

In August 2025 Foxglove and environment charity Global Action Plan filed the UK's first legal challenge to a government-approved hyperscale data centre — a 90-megawatt facility at Woodlands, Iver, Buckinghamshire, approved by the Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government over the objections of the local council. In January 2026 the government admitted a serious logical error in its decision to grant approval without requiring binding environmental commitments and conceded the case; in April 2026 developer Greystoke accepted that all environmental protections would be legally enforceable rather than discretionary — establishing a precedent Foxglove has since cited in subsequent challenges. Foxglove extended the data centre programme to South Africa in April 2026, filing objections alongside the Housing Assembly, represented by the Legal Resources Centre, to an Equinix application to build a 160-megawatt data centre campus at King Air Industria, Cape Town, challenging the approval as inadequately assessed for water and power impacts. Cape Town's Municipal Planning Tribunal approved the application in July 2026 despite the objections; an appeal was pending. In August 2026 Foxglove called on South Africa's Human Rights Commission to investigate the human rights impacts of South Africa's accelerating data centre expansion more broadly.

In July 2025 Foxglove launched an international legal challenge to Google's practice of using journalists' content without compensation to generate AI Overview search summaries, partnering with the Independent Publishers Alliance and the Movement for an Open Web. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority announced conduct requirements in June 2026 allowing news publishers to opt out of having their content used in AI Overviews — the first such regulatory restriction in any jurisdiction. In April 2026 Brazil's competition regulator separately voted to open a formal investigation following Foxglove's complaint.

From early 2026 Foxglove has coordinated the "No Palantir In Our NHS" campaign (nopalantir.org.uk), challenging the UK government's £330 million contract with Palantir for the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP). Foxglove's analysis found roughly 30% of NHS trusts using the platform were operating on fewer patients than before implementation, and it filed complaints with the UK Office for Statistics Regulation over NHS England's effectiveness claims for the system. In June 2026 the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee called on the government to end the contract and exercise a 2027 break clause; the same month NHS England admitted its published data did not support the effectiveness claims it had made. In July 2026 the UK statistics watchdog required stronger caveats on government and Palantir marketing claims for the platform.

Foxglove's tech-worker-power programme continued to expand in 2026 with two London-based TikTok workers filing separate legal challenges — one dismissed seven days before a scheduled union recognition vote, another fired for supporting colleagues' unionisation efforts — and an Amazon Coventry case in which Foxglove-supported workers lost a union recognition vote by 27 votes in 2024 amid tactics including one-click departure QR codes, with subsequent legal arguments contributing to Employment Rights Act changes restricting such practices. In the same period Foxglove appeared at a July 2026 Nairobi hearing in the case brought by Abrham Meareg against Meta, arguing that Facebook's algorithm amplified posts with death calls, his father's photo, and home address — posts that preceded the murder of Professor Meareg Amare Abrha in Ethiopia in 2021; Meta had contested the court's jurisdiction through multiple appeals and a court decision was expected in coming months.

Relationship to the broader AI-good movement

Foxglove sits at the legal-advocacy end of the grassroots AI-good landscape and is one of the few organisations whose practice combines public-law litigation against governments with worker-organising support against platforms. The organisation's working theory is that a popular, democratic response to AI requires undoing the framing that AI is a specialist field in which only programmers and data scientists have a say — and that strategic cases, told in plain language and tied to real people's experience, are an effective way to widen who feels entitled to shape how the technology is used. That positioning makes Foxglove a natural partner for groups working in adjacent registers — youth-led policy advocacy, content-moderation organising, disability-justice coalitions, immigration legal aid — and the cumulative pattern of its UK casework has established a precedent that public bodies cannot deploy automated decision-making without meaningful disclosure, accountability, and the possibility of judicial scrutiny.

By 2026 Foxglove has extended its footprint beyond the UK and Kenya to South Africa, where its appointment of a dedicated South Africa Lead and partnerships with the Housing Assembly and the Legal Resources Centre represent the organisation's first sustained engagement outside Anglophone Africa's existing digital-rights ecosystem. Foxglove's challenge to Google's AI Overviews produced the first regulatory ruling in any jurisdiction allowing publishers to opt out of AI-generated content scraping, extending its model — litigation paired with public campaign infrastructure — into transnational AI content governance.