Kate Crawford
Kate Crawford is a scholar of AI’s social, material and political foundations. She is a USC professor and visiting chair of AI and Justice at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She helped co-found AI Now and the FATE research group. Her book Atlas of AI examines the resources, labor and institutions that support the technology. In Anatomy of an AI System, she and Vladan Joler traced the networks behind an Amazon Echo. With Trevor Paglen, she investigated training datasets in Excavating AI. Crawford also leads Knowing Machines, a research program on how machine-learning systems are trained. Her work joins scholarship and collaborative art to make the structures behind everyday AI easier to inspect.
- Works
- 171
- Citations
- 20,241
- h-index
- 45
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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Before and during 2017
Creating places to study AI’s effects
Cofounded the AI Now Institute with Meredith Whittaker in 2017.
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2018
Mapping a voice assistant’s material life
Created Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler.
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2019
Looking inside training labels
Created Excavating AI with Trevor Paglen, examining the politics of training data.
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2021
Writing Atlas of AI
Published Atlas of AI in 2021.
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2023
Extending the map through history
Created Calculating Empires with Vladan Joler in 2023.
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2026
Continuing across research institutions
Her 2026 roles include positions at USC and ENS and fellowships.
Sources and credits
Photo: Cmichel67, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
