Encode

Encode — founded in 2020 as Encode Justice by then-15-year-old Sneha Revanur to fight algorithmic bias, and later renamed — grew into a network of young volunteers across dozens of countries and the most visible youth voice in AI policy. Revanur has been called the “Greta Thunberg of AI,” and the group’s premise is generational: the people who will live longest with AI’s consequences deserve a seat at the table.

From student club to statehouse

Encode became a serious legislative operator in California, co-sponsoring Scott Wiener’s SB 1047 frontier-model safety bill in 2024 — vetoed by Governor Newsom after a fierce industry campaign — and returning as co-sponsor of its successor SB 53, which was signed into law in 2025. In December 2024 it filed an amicus brief supporting Elon Musk’s motion to block OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit company, arguing the nonprofit structure provided “essential governance guardrails.” Geoffrey Hinton publicly backed the filing, warning that letting OpenAI shed its safety-focused charter “sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”

The advocacy carried costs: in 2025 OpenAI subpoenaed Encode amid the restructuring fight, a move Revanur publicly denounced — and which critics across the policy world read as a heavyweight leaning on a youth nonprofit. Encode has kept pressing on deepfakes, companion chatbots, and federal AI safety legislation.

Encode is not abolitionist about AI; its throughline is accountability — that a handful of companies racing to build transformative systems should not write their own rules.