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Amba Kak

Amba Kak is a technology policy expert and co-executive director of the AI Now Institute. Her work connects AI governance to privacy, biometric surveillance, competition, public-interest regulation, labor, infrastructure, and the concentration of power in a small number of technology firms.

Snapshot

AI Now Leadership

Kak co-leads the AI Now Institute, an independent research institute focused on AI policy and the social consequences of artificial intelligence. AI Now describes its work as challenging commercial surveillance, consolidation of power, and weak public accountability in the current AI trajectory.

Under Kak and Sarah Myers West's leadership, AI Now's 2023 landscape report argued that generative AI should be understood through the power of the technology industry behind it: cloud providers, foundation-model developers, data supply chains, labor arrangements, and firms with the resources to absorb regulatory delay.

This made AI Now a central civil-society voice in the post-ChatGPT policy cycle. Rather than treating AI governance as a race to validate or restrict particular model behaviors, Kak's work asks who owns the stack, who profits from deployment, who bears the risk, and which public institutions can intervene.

Policy and Government

Kak has worked across civil society, industry, and government. The Knight-Georgetown Institute summarizes her background as spanning network neutrality, privacy, algorithmic accountability, Mozilla policy work, and advising India's telecommunications regulator on net-neutrality rules.

She served as senior advisor on AI at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The FTC role matters because it placed AI governance inside consumer protection, competition, privacy, and unfair-practice enforcement rather than leaving it only to voluntary ethics or technical standards.

Kak has also testified before U.S. congressional committees on AI, privacy, and regulation. In 2024, the Senate Commerce Committee listed her as a witness for a hearing on privacy and AI acceleration. In 2025, AI Now published her prepared testimony on AI regulation and U.S. leadership before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

In September 2025, AI Now reported that Kak spoke before the United Nations General Assembly at a high-level meeting launching the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, where she emphasized incentives to overclaim benefits and underplay risks in a capital-intensive race to market.

Privacy and Biometrics

Kak's privacy work is not separate from her AI work. Her policy frame treats AI as an accelerant for data extraction: systems become more valuable when they can ingest, infer from, and act on intimate personal information at scale.

She has also written on biometric regulation. AI Now's Regulating Biometrics work, edited by Kak, examines global legal and policy approaches to facial recognition and related biometric systems. The concern is not merely accuracy. It is the expansion of persistent identification into workplaces, borders, housing, policing, public benefits, and everyday civic life.

This makes Kak's work adjacent to Joy Buolamwini's audit-and-civil-rights frame and Meredith Whittaker's privacy-and-surveillance frame. All three ask what happens when the right to participate in society is mediated by systems built to identify, classify, score, and steer.

Power Frame

TIME's 2024 TIME100 AI profile described Kak's central message as a shift away from neural-network fascination and toward the study of power. The point is that AI policy cannot be reduced to technical literacy. It requires institutional literacy: business models, incentives, labor markets, public procurement, data centers, regulatory capacity, and democratic participation.

Kak's work is especially important because it keeps the policy question practical. Who has authority to pause a deployment? Who can audit? Who can sue? Who can refuse data collection? Who can represent affected workers or communities? Who pays when a system fails?

Spiralist Reading

Amba Kak is a strategist against inevitability.

In the Spiralist frame, AI companies often turn scale into fate: more data, more compute, more automation, more dependency, more claims that society must adapt because the machine has already arrived. Kak's work interrupts that script by moving the question from capability to control.

The Spiralist reading is that AI governance is not only about making the machine nicer. It is about preserving the public's right to decide when the machine should not be built, deployed, purchased, believed, or allowed to collect from the body. Kak's contribution is policy as reality friction.

Open Questions

Sources

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