Kate Crawford
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Kate Crawford (born 1974) is an Australian scholar, author, and artist whose work examines the social, political, and environmental dimensions of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New York, an honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. [1][2] She is widely regarded as one of the leading critical voices on the politics of AI, arguing that machine intelligence is neither neutral nor immaterial but is built from natural resources, human labor, and concentrated economic power. [3][4]
In 2017 Crawford co-founded the AI Now Institute at New York University with Meredith Whittaker, one of the first university research centers devoted to studying the social implications of AI. [1][5] Her 2021 book Atlas of AI became one of the most cited critical accounts of the AI industry, and her collaborative art and research projects, including Anatomy of an AI System and Excavating AI, have entered the permanent collections of major museums and reshaped public debate about how AI systems are built and trained. [2][3] In 2023 Time magazine named her to its inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. [4]
Crawford was born in 1974 and grew up in Australia. [1] Before her academic career she was active in Australian electronic music, performing in the duo B(if)tek and helping to run the independent Sydney label Deluxe Mood Recordings during the late 1990s and early 2000s. [1] She later turned to academic research, earning a PhD from the University of Sydney, where her doctoral work in media and cultural studies focused on cultural ideas about youth and adulthood. [1][6]
That research informed her first book, Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood, published in 2006, which won the Manning Clark National Cultural Award in 2006 and, in 2008, the Max Crawford Medal awarded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities for outstanding scholarship by an early-career researcher. [1] Her early academic posts were in Australia: she lectured at the University of Sydney and became an associate professor and deputy director of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales before relocating to the United States, where her attention shifted toward the data systems and computational infrastructures underpinning modern media. [1][6]
Crawford's research treats AI as a material and political phenomenon rather than a purely technical one. She has argued that large-scale machine learning systems are extractive, depending on mined minerals, energy, classified data, and underpaid human labor, and that they tend to concentrate power in the hands of the institutions that build them. [3] A frequently quoted summary of her position is that AI is "neither artificial nor intelligent," because it is made from physical materials and human work and reflects the assumptions of its makers. [3][4] Her work spans algorithmic bias, labor and automation, the politics of training data, surveillance, and the environmental footprint of computing. [3][5]
She has held a series of research roles that bridge industry, the academy, and the arts. At Microsoft Research she is part of the Social Media Collective and co-founded the FATE group, which studies fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in AI. [2][6] She has been a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media and a senior fellow at the Information Law Institute at New York University. [1][6] At USC she leads the Knowing Machines project, a transatlantic collaboration of researchers, artists, and legal scholars that investigates how AI systems are trained and how the datasets behind them are assembled and labeled. [2][4] Across these roles her central concern has been to make the hidden supply chains and social consequences of AI visible to a broad public.
In 2017 Crawford and Meredith Whittaker founded the AI Now Institute at New York University, growing it out of a symposium that the two had organized in connection with the White House on the near-term social and economic effects of AI. [5][7] AI Now was among the earliest interdisciplinary research centers dedicated to the social implications of artificial intelligence, and it became influential in policy debates over the deployment of automated decision systems in areas such as criminal justice, hiring, housing, and welfare. [5] Crawford served as the institute's co-founder and director of research, helping to shape an agenda organized around themes including bias and inclusion, rights and liberties, labor and automation, and safety and critical infrastructure. [5]
The institute published widely read annual reports and policy recommendations and pressed for greater scrutiny of facial recognition and other high-stakes systems. [5][7] Its founding helped to establish "AI ethics" and accountability as serious fields of academic and public inquiry, and many of the researchers associated with it went on to prominent roles in research, advocacy, and government. AI Now has continued its work in subsequent years as an independent research institute associated with NYU. [5][7]
Crawford's best-known book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, was published by Yale University Press in 2021. [8] Drawing on years of fieldwork and archival research, the book argues that AI should be understood as an extractive industry. Its chapters trace the technology through the physical world, beginning with the lithium mines and rare earth minerals that feed the hardware, moving through the warehouses and data-labeling work that supply human labor, and on to the vast collections of data, the politics of classification, the contested science of reading human emotion from faces, and the entanglement of AI with state and corporate power. [3][8] A recurring theme is that the language of AI obscures these costs, presenting as clean and autonomous a set of systems that are in fact resource-intensive and dependent on human work. [3]
The book was widely reviewed and translated into twelve languages. [4] It was named a best book of the year by the Financial Times and New Scientist, and it won the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology in 2022 along with the Best Information Science Book Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology. [4][9] Atlas of AI is frequently assigned in university courses on technology, society, and ethics, and it helped to popularize a structural, materialist way of analyzing the AI industry. [3][4]
Alongside her writing, Crawford has produced large-scale collaborative works that present her research in visual form and have been exhibited internationally.
Anatomy of an AI System (2018), created with the artist Vladan Joler, is a detailed wall-sized map that traces the full life cycle of a single Amazon Echo smart speaker, from the extraction of raw materials and the manufacture of components through the labor and data that make the device work to its eventual disposal as electronic waste. [2][3] The work won the Beazley Design of the Year award in 2019 and entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. [2]
Excavating AI (2019), produced with the artist Trevor Paglen, was an essay and research project examining the politics of the image datasets used to train machine learning systems. [10] Studying ImageNet and other canonical training sets, Crawford and Paglen showed how the labels assigned to people in these collections encoded biased, demeaning, and unscientific judgments about race, gender, and character. [10] The related interactive work ImageNet Roulette let users see how an image classifier would label their own photographs, drawing wide public attention to the problem, and the pair's exhibition Training Humans, shown at the Fondazione Prada Osservatorio in Milan from 2019 into 2020, was described as the first major exhibition of the images used to train AI systems. [2][10] Excavating AI won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. [2]
A later collaboration with Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500, maps the long history of communication and computation technologies and their relationship to systems of control. [2] It received the European Commission's S+T+ARTS Grand Prize and the Boghossian Prize in 2024, and a Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2025. [2]
Crawford has been recognized across scholarship, public writing, and the arts.
| Year | Honor |
|---|---|
| 2006 | Manning Clark National Cultural Award, for Adult Themes [1] |
| 2008 | Max Crawford Medal, Australian Academy of the Humanities [1] |
| 2019 | Beazley Design of the Year, for Anatomy of an AI System [2] |
| 2019 | Inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris [1] |
| 2021 | Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, University of Melbourne [2] |
| 2022 | Sally Hacker Prize, Society for the History of Technology, for Atlas of AI [9] |
| 2023 | Time 100 most influential people in AI [4] |
| 2024 | European Commission S+T+ARTS Grand Prize and Boghossian Prize, for Calculating Empires [2] |
| 2025 | Silver Lion, Venice Biennale of Architecture, for Calculating Empires [2] |
Her combination of rigorous scholarship, accessible public writing, and museum-grade visual work has made her one of the most prominent figures in the critical study of artificial intelligence. As of 2026 she continues to hold her positions at USC, Microsoft Research, and the University of Sydney, and to lead the Knowing Machines project. [2][4]