National Whistleblower Center

The National Whistleblower Center (NWC) is a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit founded in 1988 to advance the legal rights of whistleblowers through legislative advocacy, direct legal assistance, and public education. Built on the experience of the law firm Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto — which fought the nuclear industry's use of NDA-enforced employee silence at the Comanche Peak nuclear plant in Texas — NWC has spent more than three decades embedding whistleblower protection language into landmark U.S. accountability legislation. It now operates as the primary institutional advocate for federal statutory protection of AI-sector whistleblowers, running a major legislative campaign for the AI Whistleblower Protection Act since its introduction in May 2025.

Founding and legislative track record

NWC's founding arose directly from a nuclear safety confrontation. Stephen M. Kohn, Michael D. Kohn, and David K. Colapinto filed a case challenging an industry-wide practice of requiring Comanche Peak nuclear plant employees to sign non-disclosure agreements barring them from reporting safety concerns to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The case successfully voided the NDAs, establishing a precedent that shaped both regulatory action and subsequent statutory reform. The structural pattern it identified — corporations using contractual language to immunize themselves from insider accountability — is structurally identical to the AI-sector non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements the organization is fighting in 2025.

Over the following decades, NWC advocacy contributed whistleblower protection provisions to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), the Dodd-Frank Act (2010), the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (2012), and the Anti-Money Laundering Whistleblower Improvement Act (2021). Each insertion required sustained congressional engagement, committee testimony, and coalition building across labor, transparency, and civil-liberties organizations — the multi-sector legislative model NWC now applies to AI-sector accountability.

Notable supported cases include Brad Birkenfeld, who exposed UBS's systematic assistance with U.S. tax evasion and received a $104 million reward from the IRS whistleblower program, and Bunny Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers chief contracting officer demoted after objecting to no-bid contracts awarded to Halliburton during the Iraq War. NWC also helped force the FBI to establish internal whistleblower protection procedures and create crime lab accreditation standards.

Stephen Kohn serves as board chair; Michael Kohn as president; David Colapinto as general counsel. FBI whistleblowers Jane Turner and Fredrick Whitehurst both serve on the board — a governance structure that places former whistleblower-subjects in leadership over the institution that championed their cases. Siri Nelson joined as executive director in 2021.

AI Whistleblower Protection Act campaign

The AI Whistleblower Protection Act (AIWPA), introduced on May 5, 2025 by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) with bipartisan co-sponsors Chris Coons (D-DE), Jay Obernolte (R-CA), and Ted Lieu (D-CA), is NWC's highest-priority campaign for 2025. The bill creates explicit statutory protection for individuals who disclose information about AI security vulnerabilities or violations of federal law during AI development or deployment. Its substantive provisions directly address the deterrent stack facing AI-sector insiders: it prohibits non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements that would prevent disclosures to federal agencies; bars employer retaliation; establishes Department of Labor reporting channels; and provides remedies including doubled back pay, reinstatement, attorney fee recovery, and a three-year statute of limitations.

NWC has organized constituent engagement campaigns urging the public to contact their representatives in support of the bill. On June 10, 2025, a coalition letter signed by more than 20 tech safety advocacy organizations — including Americans for Responsible Innovation, Center for Democracy and Technology, Center for Humane Technology, Government Accountability Project, National Employment Law Project, The Tech Oversight Project, and The Signals Network — urged Congress to pass the legislation. NWC coordinates the campaign and is a signatory.

The framing NWC applies to the AIWPA invokes the social media comparison: Congress failed to act on regulatory proposals during the early social media era, and the consequences are documented in congressional testimony, algorithmic harm research, and a generation of platform-accountability campaigns. NWC's position is that the AI sector is at an equivalent inflection point, and that statutory whistleblower protection is the accountability mechanism most likely to produce results before documented harm accumulates at scale.

On July 30, 2025 — National Whistleblower Appreciation Day — NWC hosted a Capitol Hill event where speakers included departing OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, The Signals Network's Margaux Ewen, and Senator Grassley. The event directly connected the AIWPA campaign to the AI accountability concerns raised by Kokotajlo and thirteen departing researchers who signed the "Right to Warn" open letter in 2024, grounding the legislative campaign in specific documented cases of insider suppression.

Movement function and engagement layer

NWC's movement function operates through three distinct mechanisms. At the statutory layer, it embeds accountability infrastructure into legislation — the AIWPA provisions create a pathway by which AI insiders can report to the Department of Labor, access federal courts, and hold employers to statutory liability, bypassing the contractual blockades that currently make lawful disclosure uniquely dangerous in the AI sector. At the coalition layer, the 20+ signatory coalition for the AIWPA letter demonstrates NWC's capacity to coordinate across civil-liberties, labor, consumer advocacy, and tech-safety organizations around a shared legislative goal. At the constituent-engagement layer, NWC runs action-alert campaigns in which members of the public contact their congressional representatives — the classic grassroots legislative mobilization shape applied to AI accountability.

The organization operates at small scale relative to its legislative ambitions: 2024 revenue was $439,947 against $479,716 in expenses, with four employees. Funding sources include the Whistleblower Legal Defense Foundation, Georgetown University, Skoll Foundation, and Energy Foundation. NWC's leverage is disproportionate to its budget because its legislative impact accretes through statute — a whistleblower protection provision successfully embedded in the Dodd-Frank Act remains law across decades and enforcement cycles, compounding the organization's prior campaign output regardless of annual operating scale.

NWC occupies a distinct niche in the AI whistleblower infrastructure cluster: while Whistleblower Aid provides individual legal representation to AI-sector disclosers and the AI Whistleblower Initiative supports the Berlin-based support network for frontier-AI insiders, NWC operates at the statutory layer — building the legal architecture that makes individual cases less costly and external disclosure lawfully viable. The three organizations together constitute the current AI whistleblower infrastructure in the United States and Europe.