Amba Kak

Amba Kak is a US-based technology policy strategist and researcher. She is the executive director of the AI Now Institute.

Education and career
Kak trained as a lawyer at the National University of Juridical Sciences in 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 from University of Oxford. At Oxford University, her research focused on net 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 at Northeastern University.

From 2016 to 2019, Kak was an adviser with the Mozilla Corporation.

In 2021, Kak was nominated to serve as AI adviser at the US Federal Trade Commission.

She serves as a board member at the Signal Foundation, advisory board member at the Mozilla Foundation and a working group member at the Ada Lovelace Institute.

AI policy and surveillance
Kak's work and research and advocacy is centred around the risks new technological advancement can pose to public interest and society. In that Kak advised regulators and lawmakers on the design of policy measures in the area of artificial intelligence. In 2018, Kak raised concerns about India’s legislative changes that provided the government with greater means to surveil their citizens.

In 2023, Kak contributed to the discussion on the risks of AI technology to solidify and reinforce the dominance of large tech companies.

Kak frequently commented on the possibility for biometric identification to enable mass surveillance by governments. She advocated for a ban on all remote biometric identification because of the risk these technologies present to democracy, including for well establish so-called Western political regimes.