AI takes many forms. Like the word “transportation”, it refers to a collection of technologies as diverse and distinctive as bicycles to rockets. But today, one version of AI takes all the oxygen: large-scale, generative systems that power products like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.
These systems consume an unfathomable amount of data, land, energy, labor, and water. They are rooted in profoundly disturbing ideologies that seek to flatten the world into a “one size fits all” abstraction and to replace humans with machines.
We call the companies leading this form of AI development “empires”. Under the guise of a civilizing mission to "benefit all of humanity”, they use large-scale AI development as cover to consolidate resources, destroy ecosystems, centralize information, hollow out institutions, and gain paramount economic and political power.
It doesn’t have to be this way. As AI researchers, journalists, and critical scholars, we have built, documented, and imagined radical alternatives that do precisely the opposite: center community, celebrate human agency, honor local context and history, and rejuvenate the planet.
Now people around the world are mobilizing to resist the empires of AI and to nourish visions of the future that work for all of us. Amid an onslaught of negative news, this project centers hope.
Nothing about the current trajectory of AI development is inevitable. It was shaped by the thousands of subjective decisions of a tiny elite, and continues its march based on the active participation and tacit consent of people globally.
Inspired by Choose Democracy’s Resist List against authoritarianism, we organized the AI resistance movements we documented based on how they pressure different “Pillars of Support” that uphold and perpetuate the empires.
Our list is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather we selected a sample of movements to show different approaches to resistance and to illustrate how anyone can help shape the future of AI development.
Our nine pillars