Trump AI plan rips the brakes out of the car and gives Big Tech exactly what it wanted
Kate Brennan, associate director of the AI Now Institute, called the whole plan a gift for the big tech companies that will build these datacenters. "Big Tech got exactly what it wanted in this action plan, and we're poised to see an acceleration that is built on deregulatory principles and very little consideration for the public at large," she warned.
The Register
Jul 24, 2025
Trump’s AI plan: Pull back restraints on tech
A coalition of privacy advocates, labor unions and other organizations are calling for a People’s Action Plan to counter the Trump administration’s proposals. Its signatories include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Writers Guild of America East and research institute the AI Now Institute.
CNN
Jul 24, 2025
How the White House AI plan helps, and hurts, in the race against China
Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, told Defense One that the new action plan “amounts to a workaround” of that failed provision. “The action plan, at its highest level, reads just like a wish list from Silicon Valley,” she said.
Defense One
Jul 23, 2025
Trump unveils AI plan that aims to clamp down on regulations and ‘bias’
"The White House AI Action plan was written by and for tech billionaires, and will not serve the interests of the broader public," said Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute.
BBC
Jul 23, 2025
Trump’s ‘AI Action Plan’ to mix tech industry wishlist with culture war attacks on ‘woke AI’
Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, which helped lead the effort, said the coalition expects Trump’s plan to come “straight from Big Tech’s mouth.”
Fortune
Jul 23, 2025
Musk’s xAI was a late addition to the Pentagon’s set of $200 million AI contracts, former defense employee says
The Pentagon’s use of commercial LLMs has drawn some criticism, in part because AI models are generally trained on enormous sets of data that may include personal information on the open web. Mixing that information with military applications is too risky, said Sarah Myers West, a co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, a research organization.
NBC News
Jul 22, 2025
Trump’s ‘Artificial Intelligence Action Plan’ is already stirring debate
“The rollout of the technology is acting in ways that push down wages, that devalue our work, that are harming our environment and affecting community health,” said Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, which helped organize the statement. “The idea that the public should have a voice in whether and under what conditions this technology gets used is really at the center of this effort.”
Washington Post
Jul 22, 2025
Big Tech enters the war business: How Silicon Valley is becoming militarized
“We argue that this is simply a cover for these companies to concentrate even more power and funding,” says Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, a research center focused on the societal consequences of AI. Presenting themselves as protagonists of a quasi-civilizational crusade protects tech companies from “regulatory friction,” branding any call for accountability as “a detriment to national interests.” And it allows them to position themselves “not only as too big, but also as too strategically important to fail,” reads a recent AI Now Institute report.
El País
Jul 21, 2025
Facebook blocked my family. We have no idea why.
Big Tech’s power "is contingent on a public that is submissive [and] passive,” as Amba Kak says in Brian Bergstein’s Boston Globe piece. But that's changing. The public is reasserting power and demanding a say in our technological future.
Boston Globe
Jul 9, 2025
Why the AI moratorium’s defeat may signal a new political era
The moratorium fight may have signaled a bigger political shift. “In the last few months, we’ve seen a much broader and more diverse coalition form in support of AI regulation generally,” says Amba Kak, co–executive director of the AI Now Institute. After years of relative inaction, politicians are getting concerned about the risks of unregulated artificial intelligence.
MIT Technology Review
Jul 9, 2025
What Open AI Doesn’t Want You to Know
AI companies are spending millions to get the laws they want. They're not trying to cure cancer, or save America. These companies want to make $100 billion overnight, and they're willing to sponsor dangerous laws to make it happen.
More Perfect Union
Jul 2, 2025
Senators Came to Their Senses on AI Regulation Ban
“If there’s one lesson from the last decade of social media,” Kak added, “it’s that it’s difficult, maybe even impossible, to catch up with this tech sector once business models and practices have already been entrenched.”
Bloomberg
Jul 1, 2025
The GOP bill that would unleash AI is getting closer to passing. AI Now’s Amba Kak says the plan keeps getting worse.
A wide swath of groups and lawmakers from across the political spectrum have raised alarms about the proposal to ban state-level regulations of AI for the next five years.
Hard Reset
Jul 1, 2025
California seeks new guardrails on automated AI systems
In California, the state Senate has voted in favor of a so-called AI Bill of Rights, which would establish new guardrails around automated decision systems (ADS). To learn more about them, Marketplace’s Nova Safo spoke with Kate Brennan, associate director of the think tank AI Now Institute.
Marketplace
Jun 23, 2025
‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ could block AI regulations for 10 years, leaving its harms unchecked
"I can imagine that for lawmakers, Republican or Democrat, whose districts rely on BEAD funding for broadband access to their rural communities, it's really a strange bargain," Kak said.
PolitiFact
Jun 17, 2025
The Storm Clouds Looming Past the State Moratorium: Weak Regulation is as Bad as None
We must remain vigilant against a scenario that’s as harmful as no regulation itself: weak regulation that serves to legitimize the AI industry’s behavior and continue business as usual. A federal law that imposes baseline transparency disclosures and then restricts states’ ability to impose additional—or stricter—requirements could place us on a dangerous trajectory of inaction.
Tech Policy Press
Jun 11, 2025
Big AI isn’t just lobbying Washington—it’s joining it
On Tuesday, the AI Now Institute, a research and advocacy nonprofit that studies the social implications of AI, released a report that accused AI companies of “pushing out shiny objects to detract from the business reality while they desperately try to derisk their portfolios through government subsidies and steady public-sector (often carceral or military) contracts.” The organization says the public needs “to reckon with the ways in which today’s AI isn’t just being used by us, it’s being used on us.”
Fortune
Jun 6, 2025
Trump’s Big, Beautiful Handout to the AI Industry
The patchwork is hardly as daunting as Obernolte claims it is, argued Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, a think tank that opposes commercial surveillance. The most sweeping state legislation that has actually passed — in California and Colorado — mostly addresses transparency about when AI is being used, she said. Laws in other states are designed to go after the worst-of-the-worst actors in the developing field, Kak said. Those laws target political “deepfakes,” AI “revenge porn,” and the use of AI by health insurance companies.
The Intercept
May 29, 2025
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