Employees at AI labs should form unions to negotiate AI safety standards

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Results (11 votes):

Total (11 votes)

For 6 (55%) Abstain 5 (45%) Against 0 (0%)

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For (6)

Scott Alexander
Author and psychiatrist

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votes For and says:

these union deals could also provide a standard that the industry could rally around, or a clear starting point for government intervention.
Unverified source (Nov 12, 2026)

added 9min ago

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Garrison Lovely
Journalist and author of Obsolete, a book about the AI industry and labor.

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votes For and says:

it might be better to stay and organize your coworkers who also care about safety and try to form a union.
Unverified source (Sep 29, 2026)

added 9min ago

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Hamilton Nolan
Labor journalist; author of the "How Things Work" newsletter and the book "The Hammer"; former writer at Gawker and In These Times

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votes For and says:

organize themselves into an ad hoc union to demand a slowdown on AI research in the name of safety.
Unverified source (Sep 14, 2026)

added 8min ago

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John Chadfield
National officer for technology at the Communication Workers Union in the UK.

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votes For and says:

Fundamentally, the push for unionization is about holding Google to its own ethical standards on AI
Unverified source (May 5, 2026)

added 9min ago

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Harrison Gietz
Writer who proposed AI safety unions for frontier AI company employees.

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votes For and says:

there might be meaningful leverage in having an external “union” of frontier AI company employees.
Unverified source (Oct 15, 2025)

added 8min ago

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Meredith Whittaker
Signal President; AI policy advocate

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votes For and says:

building structural power that will allow Google workers to hold leadership accountable is something worth doing. And generally, this is called a union.
Unverified source (Jul 16, 2019)

added 8min ago

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Abstain (5)

Andrea Dehlendorf
Labor organizer and adviser to the Coalition of Concerned AI Staff.

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abstains and says:

Employees could take action to pace recursive self-improvement (RSI) development, given both the risk of automating their own jobs and the elimination of safety oversight.
Unverified source (Oct 9, 2026)

added 8min ago

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Boyd Kane
Writer on AI safety and author of “What if AI Safety employees unionised?”

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abstains and says:

Possibly, a union isn’t actually required. AI safety employees could (in theory) agree to resign if certain red-lines were crossed
Unverified source (Aug 24, 2026)

added 8min ago

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Dave Banerjee

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abstains and says:

This updates me against thinking that organizing lab employees is that valuable of an intervention.
Unverified source (Jul 15, 2026)

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Adam Dionne

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abstains and says:

they likely have little bargaining power for unionization or pause coordination
Unverified source (Oct 16, 2025)

added 7min ago

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Timnit Gebru
AI ethics researcher; DAIR founder

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abstains and says:

we need much stronger labor protection laws in order to allow even AI researchers to organize against things that they see going really wrong
Unverified source (Oct 6, 2021)

added 8min ago

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