person
Kate Crawford
Author of Atlas of AI; USC research professor
Research professor whose 2021 Atlas of AI reframes AI as a system of material, labour, and data extraction. Critiques the 'intelligence' framing and calls for AI governance tied to planetary costs and power.
Profile
expertise
Policy / meta
Specialises in AI policy, regulation, governance, philanthropy, or movement strategy. Reads the technical literature but does not produce it.
USC research professor. Co-founded AI Now Institute. 'Atlas of AI' (2021) shaped critical AI scholarship. Not a technical AI researcher.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Recognised in AI ethics and academic circles; some mainstream press.
vintage
Deep-learning rise
Came up post-AlexNet. ImageNet, AlphaGo, transformer paper. DeepMind, Google Brain, FAIR establish the modern lab template.
AI Now 2017, Atlas of AI 2021. Her critical-AI scholarship is a deep-learning era response.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
AI skepticendorses
AGI risk narratives overstated; real harms are mundane and currentArgues AI is better understood as an extractive industry than as an autonomous agent; the interesting governance questions are about labour, data, and land.
“AI is made from vast amounts of natural resources, fuel, and human labor. It is a technology of extraction.”
Context: Opening framing of Atlas of AI.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Kate Crawford's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.