Sneha Revanur

speaker

393 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Sneha Revanur’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

And so I think that as an organization that was doing this specific instance of public-facing advocacy and public pressure building, but is also doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes coalitional work and doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes advocacy, it was important for us to kind of balance those interests and make sure that we weren't closing the situation in a way that would close off future possibilities for us to work together.

And I think that if you look at what happened with Illinois...

If you look at the fact that they've obviously been making some positive updates, it hasn't been perfect, and there are still lots of things that we have complaints about.

But I think that sentiment has been somewhat vindicated, right?

Of like, this company actually is willing to come to the table on certain things, and more importantly,

they are responsive to pressure and they are responsive to changing incentives.

And like now that these laws are passing and like there's clearly momentum on the side of AI safety, they kind of are like realizing that they have to make some concessions and that's actually happening in real time.

So I don't know, I feel very grateful in hindsight and I was very confident back then that that was the right thing to do.

And I think that some of the recent momentum has proven that too.

Yeah, of course.

I wouldn't over-claim and say that all this is downstream of our individual relationship with OpenAI.

I think that there are shifting winds here.

And I think that very broadly, it's just a sign that companies are responsive to pressure.

And so we should keep putting pressure.

And for example, when it comes to the Illinois bill endorsement or some of the other things,

I expect that some of that has to do with researchers internally making noise and putting pressure on the global affairs team.

It's been pretty interesting just for me to see over the past couple of months that it seems like a lot of employees at OpenAI just aren't really aware of the company's pretty shady political activities and have only woken up to that over the past couple of months.

And so as more OpenAI employees who sit outside the global affairs arm have realized some of the stuff that the company is doing and that Chris Lehane, who runs the global affairs team, is doing,

They have made some more noise about this, which has obviously led to the company probably shifting its position.

From what I've seen, it seems like the company actually has a pretty good culture of internal dissent.

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