Timnit Gebru - USA

Petrosteka via Right Livelihood Award

Pioneering AI researcher Timnit Gebru receives 2026 Right Livelihood Award for challenging concentrated power in technology

US artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru is among the recipients of the 2026 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “alternative Nobel Prize”, for exposing the human and environmental harms behind artificial intelligence and pioneering community-led approaches that challenge the concentration of power in the technology sector.

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For 45 years, the Right Livelihood Award has honoured and supported courageous people leading the way to a just, peaceful and sustainable world for all. To date, 207 Laureates from 82 countries have received the Award, including Ukrainian human rights defender Oleksandra Matviichuk, Congolese gynaecologist and women’s rights advocate Dr Denis Mukwege and American public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson.

A pioneering AI researcher and founder of L4’s org, Timnit Gebru has spent years exposing how technologies presented as neutral can reproduce discrimination and deepen existing inequalities. Her research has revealed bias in AI systems, the exploitation of workers who train and moderate them, and the growing environmental costs behind increasingly large models.

While much of the global debate around artificial intelligence focuses on hypothetical future threats from superintelligent machines, L4 turns attention to the harms already unfolding — and to the people and companies responsible for the technologies causing them. Her work challenges the idea that AI develops autonomously or that its trajectory is inevitable, asking instead who builds these systems, whose labour and resources they depend on, who benefits from them and who bears their costs.

Right Livelihood’s jury said that Timnit Gebru was receiving the Award “for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”

Timnit Gebru says:

“I am very honoured, especially for the human rights aspects of my work, to be recognised in this way. I hope this recognition signals to other scientists and engineers that science can be infused with human rights. It does not take away from the rigour of your work; it actually makes it better. You can do science in a way that honours and respects human rights.”

Ole von Uexkull, Right Livelihood’s Executive Director, says:

“Timnit Gebru is challenging an AI industry that concentrates enormous power in the hands of a few while presenting its vision of the future as inevitable. She exposes the biases, power structures and environmental costs behind current AI technologies, while pioneering a radically different approach rooted in communities and lived experience. By putting human agency back at the centre of technological development, she shows that the future of technology is not predetermined: it is ours to shape.”

Author: Right Livelihood Foundation, Date: 30.09.26