Meredith Whittaker

Meredith Whittaker co-founded the AI Now Institute at NYU in 2017. Before that, she worked at Google for a decade and co-organised the Google Walkout in 2018 — a protest by over 20,000 Google employees against the company's handling of sexual harassment cases. She left Google shortly after, under circumstances she has characterised as retaliation.

Whittaker's intellectual contribution to AI governance is the concept of AI as a concentration of power. Her argument — developed in AI Now Institute annual reports and in work such as "The Steep Cost of Capture" — is that AI governance debates systematically focus on proximate harms (bias, misinformation, safety incidents) while avoiding the structural question: that AI development is controlled by a very small number of organisations with the infrastructure, data, and capital to operate at frontier scale, and that this concentration is itself a governance problem regardless of whether any specific harm occurs.

As president of Signal, she runs one of the most important privacy and security organisations in the world — one funded by a non-profit endowment rather than advertising or enterprise contracts. Her work there is practically related to her governance research: Signal's model demonstrates that communication infrastructure does not have to be monetised through surveillance.