AI Now Institute

The AI Now Institute was founded in 2017 at New York University by Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker to study the social implications of artificial intelligence — one of the first research centers built on the premise that AI’s problems are political and economic, not just technical. Now an independent policy institute co-directed by Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West, both former advisers to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, it has become the intellectual home of the anti-monopoly critique of AI.

The power critique

AI Now’s signature output is its landscape reports. The 2023 edition, “Confronting Tech Power,” argued that the generative-AI boom was consolidating control over data, compute, and talent in a handful of firms; the June 2025 follow-up, “Artificial Power,” declared that “AI is fundamentally about concentration of power in the hands of Big Tech” and questioned an industry of sky-high valuations without “profit-making use cases.” Its prescriptions run to bright-line antitrust rules, structural curbs on the largest firms, and support for worker organizing rather than the existential-risk framing favored by safety groups.

The institute’s fingerprints are on the FTC-era scrutiny of AI markets — its alumni staffed the agency under Lina Khan — and its arguments echo through congressional hearings, EU policy debates, and press coverage skeptical of the AI buildout. Critics counter that AI Now underweights the technology’s genuine utility and that its predictions of a profitless industry sit awkwardly beside AI’s spreading commercial adoption.

Distinct from doom-focused organizations, AI Now is less worried that AI will destroy humanity than that a few corporations will own it — a critique of who controls the technology rather than of the technology itself.