Zershaaneh Qureshi

speaker

853 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 17 Sep

Zershaaneh Qureshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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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 over time, you've kind of been growing into this more like professionalized, more insider facing organization.

And I think something that I'm curious about here is like,

in the current world that we find ourselves in where the public is just like incredibly angry about AI.

There's this narrative, big tech is just totally out of control.

I kind of would have guessed that the original approach, the more grassrootsy kind of approach, the outside game might be actually better placed to capitalize on that kind of sentiment.

So I'm kind of wondering why you made this decision and kind of like how you've been thinking about the trade-offs here.

So when you look at ENCODE's track record, I'm wondering if there's any one example that you're especially proud of where you just feel like advocacy has really moved the needle.

So you've described a really wide range of people banding together here.

And I think that that's a worry that some people have with this coalition approach, right?

Which is that everyone here has pretty different interests, broadly speaking.

And that might end up potentially diluting the thing that you're trying to actually achieve.

So because you kind of have to target the thing that everyone can agree on, that might push you to be focusing on the lowest common denominator.

How do you navigate that?

Pushing on here, so probably ENCODE's most cited win is SB53, which is California's landmark AI safety law.

It requires frontier AI companies to publish safety protocols, protect whistleblowers, and so on.

But SB53 did only pass after its more ambitious predecessor, SB1047, was actually vetoed in the previous year.

And I think at this point, a skeptic of Encode's work would be like, look.

That bill, the bill that passed was actually just much weaker than the original.

And it also passed in an environment where attitudes had kind of already shifted.

I mean, people were more alarmed about AI at this point in time after the release of reasoning models like O3.

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