In her words
We’re seeing systems slipping out of our control; we are moving towards increasingly powerful, increasingly sophisticated systems that could potentially have grave existential harms for humanity.
We are coming at this issue from different walks of life, different backgrounds, different vantage points, because the clock is ticking and our generation needs to act.
Biography
Sneha Revanur (born 2004) founded Encode — originally Encode Justice — at fifteen, mobilizing against California’s Proposition 25 and its pretrial risk-assessment algorithms. What began as a teenager’s ballot-measure campaign grew into a youth-led movement spanning dozens of countries, and in 2023 she became the youngest person named to TIME’s inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.
From ballot measure to frontier AI
Encode co-sponsored California’s SB 1047, the 2024 frontier-AI safety bill authored by Scott Wiener, and after its veto backed the successor SB 53. In December 2024, Encode filed an amicus brief in Musk v. Altman opposing OpenAI’s conversion from nonprofit to for-profit control, arguing the restructuring would abandon safety commitments made to the public. In October 2025, OpenAI subpoenaed Encode and its general counsel, seeking communications that might tie the group to Elon Musk — a move widely read as retaliation against a shoestring nonprofit.
I think that we are at a point in time right now, where it very well could be possible that we could lose meaningful human control of AI systems as we know it.
Revanur’s advocacy spans the risk spectrum — deepfakes and disinformation, algorithmic bias, AI companions, and catastrophic loss of control — and she has organized letters demanding young people get seats on AI oversight bodies. Her argument is generational: the people who will live longest with these systems currently have the least say in how they are governed.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/sneha-revanur