How was Encode founded?

We were launched in July 2020 by high school student Sneha Revanur, then 15 years old, as a single-issue campaign against a California ballot measure seeking to expand the use of biased algorithms in the state’s justice system. In coalition with other California advocacy groups, we helped defeat the ballot measure by a 13% margin in November. But that was only an opening salvo; by then, our army of students had snowballed. We decided to keep our movement alive — and expand globally — to address other challenges presented by the age of AI, including surveillance, disinformation, democratic erosion, and potential catastrophic risk.