The People's AI Bill of Rights
Fairness · Privacy · Transparency · Accountability
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The corporate race for AI is an existential threat to our communities, our jobs, and our future.
Over the last two decades, Big Tech has rolled out product after product with virtually no oversight or accountability. The “move fast and break things” model has caused serious societal harm while tech billionaires have flooded local, state and federal governments with campaign contributions to stop regulation before it can start. The AI race has supercharged this corrupt and dangerous system.
Commercial large language models didn’t exist five years ago—yet in that brief time, they have come to pose an overwhelming threat to democracy, privacy, and our world. As of 2026, one in four federal lobbyists represent the AI industry. Meanwhile, the data centers being built for large language models (LLMs) are raising electricity prices and making grids unstable across the country, using millions of gallons of water per day (mostly in drought-prone regions), spiking levels of air pollution in vulnerable communities, threatening progress on conservation, and ruining the quality of life in communities across the country.
Polls show that a growing, cross-partisan majority of voters is deeply concerned about the rapid growth of AI. And a wide, cross-partisan majority supports strong guardrails to govern AI as well as adoption of broad privacy rules. With the Trump administration fully captured by the industry, the burden falls on states and cities to take regulatory action. Now is the time to put forward the ideas we need and build a coalition around a bold vision.
Washington State can lead. We believe that there will be broad public support for a people's AI Bill of Rights centered around four core pillars: Fairness, Privacy, Transparency, and Accountability—and that this platform can be a model for other states to follow.
Laws and regulations must be enacted immediately to establish minimum guardrails to slow the AI industry down and make it accountable to our communities.
The Four Pillars
Fairness
AI must benefit all Americans, not just billionaires. Americans' electric bills are skyrocketing because of data centers. Data centers are using millions of gallons of water a day while dumping pollution into our air and water. AI-driven layoffs are rising in knowledge fields, while AI-powered workplace surveillance puts workers in all fields under a microscope. Decisions are made by AI regarding our healthcare, jobs, education—often without our knowledge. Every day, Big Tech gobbles up more of our land, our natural resources, our economy, and even our time. Everyday people pay the price while the tech billionaires roll over our communities and call it “inevitable.”
Privacy
We must be able to live our lives without every action being watched and monetized. Surveillance powered by facial recognition, biometric technology, automatic license plate readers, and data harvesting is invading our lives. Without rules to govern these technologies, we can’t use the internet, leave our homes, or participate in society without our personal information being collected, monetized, and used to exploit us. These technologies violate our constitutional rights, make us vulnerable to scams, and give corporations new tools to extract the maximum financial “value” from each of us. Unregulated surveillance technology puts us at risk of abuse by corporations, police, stalkers, hackers, and our own government.
Transparency
We must know the true price that our communities are paying for AI and data centers. The AI industry operates in a black box, from using shell corporations and NDAs to keep the public in the dark about new data centers to hiding their algorithms and training models behind legal shields. Privacy policies are designed to protect Big Tech’s ability to harvest our data, not to protect consumers. They want to keep us in the dark about how much of our land, water, power, and natural resources they’ll really use, and how much they’re polluting. Communities increasingly have no ability to see how AI technology is being used by our own governments.
Accountability
We must be confident that harms will have consequences. Big Tech has operated for far too long without meaningful accountability. Existing civil penalties are far too small to serve as a deterrent, and without criminal penalties there’s no incentive for companies to prioritize safety or even follow the limited laws. Forced arbitration contracts strip us of our rights when harms do occur. We end up with data centers that pollute our air and waterways in order to run chatbots that cause real harm to real people. These are fixable problems, but the AI industry has chosen not to fix them.