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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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

Some of them are successful.

Others we, like I mentioned, you know, didn't know would fail until we tried.

For example, I was really proud to see the California and New York laws passed with the leadership of our determined sponsors, Scott Wiener, Alex Boras, and, you know, Andrew Guarnardes.

These laws are obviously first steps, and I can see how a skeptic could dismiss their impact on the margin.

But the real win here is not the literal first order effect of, you know, we are now requiring companies to submit safety plans because obviously many of the companies were already voluntarily doing so.

It's that we are building regulatory capacity in nimble and well-resourced states that are able to potentially activate on short timelines if the federal government doesn't act.

Yeah.

So there are two things that I would say off the bat.

The first is that in California, there's actually a pretty interesting feature of the way that state bills work there, which is that organizations actually can be in the room when the details of a bill are being decided in the form of acting as co-sponsors.

So when we co-sponsored SB 1047 and co-sponsored SB 53, we were in the room for a lot of those negotiations.

Obviously, so many of those decisions were downstream of our bill sponsor, Senator Scott Wiener, and he did an excellent job steering the ship there and sort of like

exercising very good judgment on how to think about all of these various trade-offs and negotiating with all of these stakeholders and standing strong in the face of a lot of industry lobbying, and especially in the case of SB 1047, this absolute firestorm on Twitter.

And so I think that definitely hats off to Scott Wiener for his work on that.

But I think that we were fortunate, given the nature of how California politics work, to actually get to play quite an inside-facing role that I think

organizations usually don't get to play in other states or like more broadly when working on legislative campaigns.

And I think one more thing that also really works in our favor is that we specifically take an approach that involves like overseeing the entire full stack, right?

So like owning the entire process from AI policy development to implementation.

And this is what we're trying to do a little bit of in California, New York, where like

now these laws have passed, the critical question is like, are the offices that are enforcing them going to be staffed with experts, right?

Like, does the state government actually have enough resources to execute on this effectively?

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