creators

Kate Crawford - AI ethics scholar, USC and Microsoft

Kate Crawford is a Research Professor at USC and Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research NYC. She wrote Atlas of AI and leads Knowing Machines.

Kate Crawford, born 1974, is an Australian scholar of the social and political consequences of artificial intelligence, based in New York. She took her PhD at the University of Sydney and held posts at the University of New South Wales, MIT's Center for Civic Media and NYU's Information Law Institute before co-founding the AI Now Institute with Meredith Whittaker in 2017. She wrote "Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" (Yale University Press, 2021), which traces the minerals, labour and energy behind AI systems; it was named a book of the year by the Financial Times and translated into twelve languages. With the artist Vladan Joler she made "Anatomy of an AI System", now in the permanent collections of MoMA and the V&A, and "Calculating Empires", a 24-metre diagram of technology and power since 1500 that won the Silver Lion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Crawford is a Research Professor at the University of Southern California and a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York, both confirmed on Microsoft's own staff page, and she leads the Knowing Machines Project, which studies how AI systems are trained. She is the inaugural visiting chair of AI and Justice at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, first appointed in 2019, and sits on the AI Council of Spain's President Sanchez.

Specialization

AI ethics, AI policy, political economy of AI, data infrastructure

Country

United States