The AI Resist List

The AI Resist List is a crowdsourced, living database documenting acts of resistance to the AI industry from across the world, launched on 20 May 2026 at airesistlist.org. Created by journalist Karen Hao — author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI and host of the BBC's The Interface podcast — and Petra Molnar, Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the project was built by a collaborative team of researchers, journalists, and critical scholars working across seven time zones, supported by the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), We and AI, and the Refugee Law Lab at York University. The initial scoping was led by two Migration and Technology Monitor fellows: Wael Qarssifi, a Syrian journalist covering surveillance's impact on displaced communities, and Verónica Martínez, a reporter and photojournalist documenting US–Mexico border militarization — a deliberate centering of communities with lived experience of surveillance and AI-enabled border enforcement.

Purpose and animating premise

The project's central argument is that AI development is not inevitable — that the rhetoric of inevitability functions as a political choice that concentrates corporate power and insulates AI companies from accountability. Hao describes the list as meant to "center hope" and to surface "all the different creative ways that anyone can actually participate in applying pressure to the AI industry". Molnar frames the documented resistance as work that is "creative, consequential, and still almost entirely invisible in mainstream coverage of the technology". Both framings are explicitly counter to the Silicon Valley narrative of AI as a technological force beyond democratic contestation.

The database spans legal challenges, worker organizing, community campaigns, artistic interventions, and technical tools — forms of resistance that together demonstrate AI development is neither an unstoppable force nor beyond accountability.

The Countering AI Inevitability Framework

Entries are organized under the Countering AI Inevitability Framework, four overlapping modes of resistance: Resisting (direct opposition through legal action and public mobilization), Refusing (worker and community rejection of AI deployment), Reclaiming (restoring community control over data, infrastructure, and decision-making), and Reimagining (envisioning alternative technical and governance approaches). The framework was adapted from We and AI's resistance taxonomy, designed to expand what counts as resistance beyond the protest-and-litigation forms that dominate coverage.

Nine "Pillars of Support" structure the targets of documented resistance — the interlocking structures that uphold dominant AI companies: Narratives, Funding, Data, Resource extraction, Data centers, Labour, Adoption, Surveillance, and Policy. Each documented entry is mapped to the pillar(s) it presses against, making the database a strategic map of leverage points in addition to a historical archive. This pillar structure was adapted from Choose Democracy's Resist List, a framework originally developed to organize citizen resistance to authoritarianism by identifying the institutional supports that sustain authoritarian power — here transposed to the AI industry.

Geographic coverage

At launch, nearly six in ten region-tagged entries originated from the Global Majority, spanning Germany, Japan, Kenya, Chile, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the United States. The deliberate centering of majority-world resistance reflects the project's framing that AI deployment "occurs with fewer regulatory safeguards" in many Global Majority contexts, where affected communities bear a disproportionate share of AI's harms — from data center energy and water extraction to data labeling labor — while receiving fewer of the supposed benefits.

Entry examples

The database at launch contained approximately 30 documented examples across multiple sectors and resistance forms:

Legal action. The New Mexico Environmental Law Center challenging OpenAI's "Project Jupiter" data center on environmental grounds; JMITU in Japan forcing IBM to disclose AI-driven wage-setting algorithms — one of the first documented cases of a union successfully compelling AI-wage-algorithm transparency through legal process.

Worker organizing. Kaiser Permanente mental health workers' hunger strike over AI workload intensification; the Philippine Coalition of Digital Employees–AI (CODE AI); and the Data Labelers Association in Nairobi, Kenya — connecting the Global Majority labor layer of AI supply chains to the resistance archive.

Community campaigns. Uruguayan community mobilization demanding transparency from Google data center construction; Friends of the Congo addressing cobalt mining harms in the AI supply chain. Data center resistance appears across the database as a recurring locus of action: community mobilization successfully stalled over $100 billion worth of hyperscale data center projects in 2025 alone, spanning multiple continents and cutting across political affiliations.

Technical alternatives and artistic interventions. Te Hiku Media's Te Reo Māori speech-recognition tool — a community-controlled AI model for an indigenous language, emblematic of the Reclaiming mode; Chile's Quili.ai, a human chatbot interface that routes AI-directed queries to human experts; Sam Lavigne's Slow LLM browser plugin; the "Microslop" viral campaign targeting Microsoft's AI output; Better Images of AI, a curated library of alternative AI imagery offering visual counter-framings to the dominant robot-and-brain iconography.

Four cross-cutting policy demands

Across the documented resistance, four policy demands emerge: transparency requirements throughout AI supply chains; participation mechanisms for affected communities in AI governance decisions; supply chain accountability extending to mining communities, content moderation workers, and data laborers; and public control of AI infrastructure including land, water, and energy resources. The database's collective finding is that these demands are ones "no existing regulatory framework fully addresses" — making it simultaneously an action archive and a governance gap map.

Relationship to Empire of AI and the notinevitable.ai forum

The AI Resist List launched on the first anniversary of Empire of AI's publication, the timing deliberate: where Empire of AI documents OpenAI's internal trajectory and the political economy of the AI industry's power concentration, the AI Resist List surfaces the globally distributed counter-pressure that exists alongside but largely outside that narrative. Both projects share the animating frame that AI's supposed inevitability is a choice, not a fact. An associated editorial forum, notinevitable.ai, extends the database's archival function into ongoing writing and discourse about AI resistance and alternatives.