A diverse group of journalists, researchers and scholars have launched an initiative designed to challenge the rhetoric from governments and corporations that artificial intelligence (AI) at scale is a foregone conclusion, instead framing its increasingly rapid deployment as a deliberate political choice that concentrates power and capital.
Launched in May 2026 by prominent tech journalist Karen Hao and refugee lawyer Petra Molnar, the impetus behind the AI Resist List is to document the grassroots opposition springing up globally against the technology, but which is often ignored by the corporations and policymakers peddling AI as a predetermined inevitability.
Structured around four pillars – resistance, refusal, reimagining and reclaiming – the database is intended to highlight a variety of challenges ordinary people are taking against the rapid, extractive expansion of AI technologies.
The project – which documents legal challenges, worker organising, community campaigns, artistic interventions and technical tools – was built by a global team of researchers, journalists and critical scholars, and has been supported by the Distributed AI Research Institute, We and AI, and the Refugee Law Lab at York University.
“The core claim of the AI Resist List project is simple: the ‘scale at all costs’ approach to AI development is not inevitable,” wrote Molnar in a post announcing the initiative. “People are already resisting it – in ways that are creative, consequential and still almost entirely invisible in mainstream coverage of the technology.”
The Resist List website further highlights how the various AI systems in use, but particularly generative AI (GenAI) tools, consume “unfathomable” amounts of data, land, energy, labour 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’,” said Molnar. “Under the guise of a civilising mission to ‘benefit all of humanity’, they use large-scale AI development as cover to consolidate resources, destroy ecosystems, centralise information, hollow out institutions, and gain paramount economic and political power.”
Initiatives featured
Initiatives featured in the AI Resist List include Better Images of AI, an image library designed to improve visual representations of AI by de-anthropomorphising the tech; Nightshade, a tool designed for artists that allows them to “poison” digital images of their work in a way that breaks AI models if an organisation uses it without consent in the training corpus; and Friends of the Congo, a non-governmental organisation that shines a light on the significant human costs hidden in the tech supply chains AI relies on.
Other efforts featured include work on “permacomputing”, an approach to tech development and use inspired by the ethos of permaculture in gardening or agriculture that encourages more sustainable, low-impact strategies; efforts to strengthen the technological sovereignty of indigenous communicates; and various initiatives designed to provide equal access to the internet and information by incorporating non-European languages.
During a UK launch event for the Resist List – which took place as part of London Data Week and was supported by the Digital Futures Institute at Kings College London – researchers, community organisers and people directly involved with the projects included in the list spoke about the importance of documenting the various grassroots resistance efforts, which can be used as examples of how to hold those deploying the technology to account.
They also stressed the importance of sharing methods and tactics between geographically disparate groups, and their hope that documenting the actions of ordinary people around the world will inspire and empower others to act themselves.
Yulu Pi, for example, a postdoctoral research associate at the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security, whose work tracks the “full arc” of various efforts contesting AI, said organisations deploying the tech consistently use similar tactics in response to those efforts.
This includes denying accountability by invoking the technical or operational opacity of AI models, restricting appeal windows, offering strategic concessions and applying non-disclosure agreements to make it harder for employees to go public about bad practices.
Given such barriers, Pi said that resistance to AI has to be iterative to deal with the shifting tactics deploying organisations may use. “The key takeaway from our research is really that AI contestation is not a one-shot, one-time confrontation, it has to be iterative, and you always have to navigate the new situation you are in,” she said.
“Accountability is negotiated over time. Change is contingent, partial and reversible … so I hope the AI Resist List can also document counter-AI resistance tactics. By making their playbook transparent, we can better empower people in the future to resist more effectively, for a possible AI future that is more accountable.
“But we won’t get to that future by hoping and waiting for organisations to do better, we have to give up that illusion,” said Pi.
Speaking with Computer Weekly, Tania Duarte, the founder of volunteer-run We and AI, said the Resist List offers an antidote to current AI narratives and practices dominated by the interests of large corporations.
She also shared how in the academic environments she and others on the list operate in have been captured by their reliance on big tech sponsors and partnerships, which in combination with the misplaced hype and fervour around AI is creating a situation where unabashedly pro-AI projects or research receive the majority of funding.
Highlighting how successive UK governments have also sidelined civil society and academia in favour of industry players when it comes to policy or funding decisions, Duarte said there appears to be “less and less money” for AI-critical projects, leaving research agendas “directly dictated by big tech” firms.
“People can’t be seen as anti-AI, as they won’t get the funding, and it’s hugely stifled research in this country,” she said. “Nobody says you will lose funding, but it’s now implicit in the environment, and changes how people behave when they are reliant on that funding.”
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