AI Researcher Timnit Gebru Among 2026 Right Livelihood Award Laureates
The Right Livelihood Foundation, based in Stockholm, announced on September 30, 2026, the laureates of the 2026 Right Livelihood Award: two women and two women-led organizations recognized for confronting authoritarian rule, violence and discrimination against women, and the harms caused by artificial intelligence.
The recipients are Pakistani human rights lawyer Jalila Haider, Ethiopian-born AI researcher Timnit Gebru, Georgia's Georgian Young Lawyers' Association, and the Rural Women's Assembly, a network of women farmers across Southern Africa. The foundation said the laureates were selected from 200 nominations across 72 countries, honored for their "resistance to systems that push people to the margins, and a shared insistence on putting people back at the center."
Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute, was recognized "for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency." Her work has focused on exposing harms that AI systems already cause, particularly to communities facing discrimination and exclusion.
Established in 1980 by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, the annual award honors work contributing to a more just and peaceful world. Ole von Uexkull, the foundation's executive director, said this year's laureates are "rewriting the rules that autocrats, patriarchs and Silicon Valley's most powerful men assumed were theirs to write alone."
