Arvind Narayanan

Arvind Narayanan arrived at the criticism of artificial intelligence from a direction that makes his criticism unusually hard to dismiss: he is a computer scientist who builds the systems, breaks them, and reads the appendices that everyone else skips. His first fame came from privacy—he and his doctoral advisor took a dataset that a major corporation had released as anonymous and demonstrated that the supposed anonymity was hollow, by re-identifying individuals using nothing more than small amounts of publicly available auxiliary information. The lesson he drew was epistemic rather than merely technical: a confident claim had been made by people with every incentive to believe it, the claim was false, and almost no one had checked. That posture of disciplined skepticism toward confident institutional claims—paired with a faith that the claims can be tested and the systems can be governed—carried directly into his most consequential intervention in