Amba Kak

Amba Kakis a US-based technology policy expert who is the Co-Executive Director ofAI Now Institute,a US-based research institute.
In 2021, she served as senior advisor on AI to theFederal Trade Commission,advising the US federal regulator on emerging technology issues.
She is on the Board of theSignal Foundationand working group member at the Ada Lovelace Institute and on the Steering Committee of the Knight Georgetown Institute.
In 2024TIME magazinelisted Kak among 100 most influential people in AI.
Kak was born and raised in New Delhi, India. She trained as a lawyer at theNational University of Juridical Sciencesin India. As a Rhodes scholar, she later obtained a Master's in Law and a Master of Science in the Social Science of the Internet fromUniversity of Oxford.At Oxford University, her research focused onnet neutrality.
She is a former Google policy fellow. Over the year 2016/2017 she was a Mozilla Technology Policy Fellow. Currently, Kak is a senior research fellow at Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute atNortheastern University.
From 2016 to 2019, Kak was an adviser with theMozilla Corporation.
In 2021, Kak was nominated to serve as AI adviser at the USFederal Trade Commission.
She serves as a board member at theSignal Foundation, advisory board member at theMozilla Foundationand a working group member at the Ada Lovelace Institute.
Kak was a global policy advisor toMozilla, and net-neutrality advisor to  the Indian national telecom regulator TRAI during her time as legal consultant at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.
She was selected in 2016 as one of Mozilla’s inaugural cohort of technology policy fellows, to work on global network neutrality advocacy.
In 2017, she joined Mozilla Corporation as global policy advisor, where she advised the organization on developing and advancing Mozilla’s position on issues ranging from privacy and data protection to competition and online content regulation, for example, advocating for strong privacy laws in Indiaas well as digital competition rules in France.
Kak joined AI Now in 2019, initially as Director of Global Policy, and in 2022 as Executive Director of the Institute. AI Now is a research institute focused on the social implications ofartificial intelligenceand related technologies started byMeredith WhittakerandKate Crawfordin 2017 after a symposium hosted by theWhite House. Under Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West’s leadership, AI Now was awarded the Global AI Policy Leader award in 2024 in the civil society organization category.
Kak has written and spoken publicly on concerns relating to state and commercial surveillance, in both the US and India.She has written widely on the surveillance dangers of biometric technologiesincluding as editor of an edited collection of essays titled “Regulating Biometris” published by AI Now.Her paper with Rashida Richardson on the risks of “suspect-development system” databases won the prestigious Reidenberg-Kerr Award for Outstanding Scholarship at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference.
In 2023, Kak and Sarah Myers West also spearheaded discussion on the risks ofAItechnology to solidify and reinforce the dominance of large tech companies.
Kak has served as a journal reviewer for Big Data & Society and Nature and she has reviewed conference submissions as a Program Committee member for Rights Con and for ACM FAccT.
Kak has testified before Congress at a hearing on artificial intelligence and data privacy in October 2023and before the Senate Commerce Committee in July 2024