person
Tristan Harris
Co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology; 'The AI Dilemma'
Former Google design ethicist who became the most visible critic of attention-engineered platforms. Since March 2023, he and Aza Raskin have run 'The AI Dilemma', a series of briefings to governments and media arguing AI rolls out faster than the institutions needed to handle it.
Profile
expertise
Policy / meta
Specialises in AI policy, regulation, governance, philanthropy, or movement strategy. Reads the technical literature but does not produce it.
Co-founder Center for Humane Technology. Background as Google design ethicist. AI Dilemma (2023) talk shaped public discourse but is not technical research.
recognition
Household name
Name recognition outside the AI/CS community. Featured by mainstream press, a Wikipedia page in many languages, a published bestseller, or holds a position the lay public knows.
Featured in The Social Dilemma (Netflix). Congressional testimony. Mainstream coverage.
vintage
Post-ChatGPT
Entered the AI strategy debate in or after 2023. ChatGPT was already public when their voice became influential. Often shaped by Pause letter, AISIs, AI 2027.
AI Dilemma talk March 2023. Earlier work was tech-ethics broadly; the AI focus is post-ChatGPT.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Pauseendorses
Halt frontier training until alignment catches upArgues there is a gap between what CEOs say publicly and what AI-lab insiders say privately about risk; has called for slowing deployment to match governance capacity.
“No matter how high the skyscraper of benefits that AI assembles, if it can also be used to undermine the foundation of society upon which that skyscraper depends, it won't matter how many benefits there are.”
50% of AI researchers believe there's a 10% or greater chance humans go extinct from our inability to control AI.
Context: Slide quoted in The AI Dilemma presentation.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Tristan Harris's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.