PERSON
Henry Farrell
American political scientist at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author with Gopnik, Shalizi, and Evans of the 2025 Science paper that reframed AI as a cultural and social technology.
Henry Farrell is an American political scientist whose work sits at the intersection of political economy, political theory, and the social effects of information technologies. His collaboration with Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, and James Evans on 'Large AI Models Are Cultural and Social Technologies' (Science, 2025) represents one of the most influential pieces of interdisciplinary AI scholarship of the decade — reframing LLMs not as intelligent agents but as transmission technologies whose effects should be analyzed through the lenses of media history, political economy, and the governance of cultural infrastructure rather than through the frameworks of AI safety that assume agentic intelligence.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Farrell is the SNF Agora Institute Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he works on the political economy of information, democratic theory, and the institutional consequences of digital technologies. His earlier books — including The Political Economy of Trust (2009) and (with Abraham Newman) Of Privacy and Power (2019)