Kate Crawford describes herself as “a leading scholar of artificial intelligence and its material impacts.” She is a Research Professor at the University of Southern California, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York, and a visiting chair of AI and Justice at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.
Crawford’s book “Atlas of AI” (Yale University Press) reframes AI not as a purely digital phenomenon but as a planetary industry built on minerals, energy, water, labor, and data extraction. It won three international prizes and was translated into twelve languages. She co-founded the AI Now Institute at NYU, an early research center on the social implications of AI, and FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI), and she leads the Knowing Machines project investigating how AI training data is built.
She also works at the intersection of research and art. Her project “Anatomy of an AI System,” mapping the human and environmental supply chain behind a single smart speaker, was acquired by MoMA, and her installation “Calculating Empires” won a Silver Lion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. TIME named her one of the world’s most influential people in AI.