Meredith Whittaker

Co-organized the November 2018 Google Walkout, where 20,000 employees worldwide walked out over sexual harassment policies. Demonstrated that coordinated worker action could force accountability from tech companies on ethical issues. Google eventually retaliated; Whittaker left the company.

Co-founded the AI Now Institute to study AI's societal impacts. Her foundational argument: AI systems are not neutral technologies — they are built by powerful actors, trained on historical power structures, and deployed in ways that amplify existing inequalities. The question is not 'is AI biased?' but 'whose interests does it serve?'

Argues that the existential AI risk discourse (AI will kill everyone) is largely a 'PR strategy' that serves the interests of large AI labs by shifting attention from immediate, concrete harms: worker surveillance, facial recognition, automated discrimination in hiring/lending/parole, and the consolidation of AI power in a handful of corporations.

As Signal president, argues that AI services built on surveillance business models — where user data funds training — cannot be genuinely private or trustworthy. Advocates for AI built on different economic foundations: public funding, open-source infrastructure, and data protection by design.