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

You have these forceful coalitions of family-first conservatives who think that we are gambling away the human spirit and

moms who have lost their children to addictive AI companions and singers in Nashville and actors in Hollywood who wanna protect their likeness from voice cloning.

It is like exactly this team effort across people with very different terminal goals, very different political backgrounds that has helped us stave off so far

federal preemption of state AI laws, right?

This attempt in Congress to block states from regulating AI and also override existing laws like the ones that we helped pass in California and New York, whether or not the federal framework that's replacing it is better than what we've already gotten.

And it seems to me that without some degree of active coordination, without a lot of mutual trust building, not all of these different preemption stakeholders would have found their way to each other.

So I'm really proud that we've been able to contribute to this alongside allied orgs like Americans for Responsible Innovation.

My colleague Adam, for example, leads these super cool organizations.

monthly coordination calls to engage hundreds of allies.

And if you want to know how hard coalition building is, you can take a look at the fact that the side in favor of preemption has clearly failed at aligning any coalition of their own, right?

There are these massive disagreements among industry groups and the White House and all these trade associations, all this infighting about exactly how much to yield and what affirmative position to actually take besides preempt everything we don't like, which is why they haven't been able to come forward with any sort of framework that would

satisfy any key parts of our coalition or get anyone to peel.

And so I think that coalition building is one thing that I've been really excited about as a force for, you know, getting things to happen in politics.

And we think about this all the time at ENCODE.

We are always trying to make new friends and keep them.

And it is one of our top axes for measuring our counterfactual impact.

That's a really good question.

I think that, first of all, in the case of preemption specifically, the great thing about this is that obviously it's a lot easier to rally people who have very different terminal goals against a common enemy than it is to get them to support the same thing.

And so I think that there is that calculus that works in our favor.

But I think more generally when it comes to coalition building, this is a fair concern.

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