# AI Now Institute

AI Now Institute studies the power and institutions shaping AI and advocates for public accountability.

Type: organization. Context selected by Escape Meridian; inclusion is not endorsement.

[Collection](/entities/ai-now)
[Original website](https://ainowinstitute.org/)

## Sources

- [AI Now Institute](https://ainowinstitute.org/): Connect AI deployment to corporate power, labor, public institutions and accountability.

## Perspectives

- [Who can challenge the decision matters](/perspectives?position=ai-now-public-power) (Kate Brennan, Amba Kak & Sarah Myers West): The authors argue that AI’s direction is a political choice. They call for worker organizing, enforceable limits and public accountability, so affected people can contest how institutions use AI rather than accept its expansion as inevitable.
- [Not knowing how to code is not a reason to leave the decision alone](/perspectives?position=ibrahim-learned-helplessness) (Aya Ibrahim): Ibrahim says policymakers who are willing to govern energy, commerce, and drugs treat their inability to code as a reason not to weigh in on technology.

## Terminal notes

- [Aya Ibrahim on policymakers' learned helplessness about tech](/notes/ai-now-ibrahim-2026-09-21.md): In an excerpt republished by AI Now, Aya Ibrahim questions why officials comfortable overseeing energy and medicine defer to technologists when discussing AI.

## Parallels

- [Whose voice, whose say?](/parallels?parallel=shared-creation): When your work helps train a model, what would make you a collaborator?
- [Access is a beginning](/parallels?parallel=access-and-power): Who can turn access to AI into a real choice?
- [A discovery is a beginning](/parallels?parallel=discovery-to-benefit): What has to happen for a technical advance to become a shared benefit?
- [Use it now, or govern it now?](/parallels?parallel=present-use-and-present-harm): When today's systems already change work, which present effects should set the agenda?

## Context references

- [https://ainowinstitute.org/](https://ainowinstitute.org/)

Latest published distillations: [Publications API](/api/pipeline/publications?entity=ai-now)