Regulate AI now or lose our agency, warns Nobel laureate Maria Ressa

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa has warned that artificial intelligence will strip humanity of its agency unless governments legislate to limit it now, and has urged citizens to campaign for regulation as a matter of public safety rather than free speech.

Ressa, a Filipino and American journalist who shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize in part for her reporting on the power of large technology companies, is co-chair of the United Nations' international scientific panel on artificial intelligence, which assesses how AI is reshaping lives worldwide. She spoke in Oslo, where she was attending a conference on threats to democracies.

"It is not a freedom of speech issue to ask for regulation. It's a public safety issue," said Ressa, co-founder and CEO of the news outlet Rappler. She added that without action now, the situation will tip beyond control.

Three waves

Ressa argued that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent, noting it has existed for roughly 70 years and has already reached the public in three waves. The first saw social media platforms capture attention, polarise societies and isolate individuals. The second, she said, hacked human biology through intimacy, in the form of chatbots. The third targets agency itself through agentic and multi-agentic AI — frontier models that do not merely imitate humans but act on their behalf.

She dismissed as "good spin" the argument, voiced by some critics including U.S. President Donald Trump, that regulating AI in the West would cede an advantage to China. Ressa pointed out that China places more safeguards on its own citizens than Silicon Valley does for the rest of the world, citing age restrictions on the Chinese version of TikTok.

Her remarks came before Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow the pace at which they advance model capabilities amid growing fears of misuse.

Accountability and addictive design

Ressa said the first step towards change is to make technology companies accountable for the harm they have caused. She welcomed U.S. lawsuits that led Meta Platforms to pay up to $18 billion over the next decade and to strictly limit how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram.

She also welcomed moves by the European Union and countries led by Australia to impose age limits on social media, but said such steps do not address a fundamental flaw: the tools built by tech companies are addictive for adults as well as teenagers. "We know this is harmful, so you should remove the addictive features, not just for teenagers, but for all of us," she said, adding that adults, not only the young, are being manipulated politically around the world.

Public-interest platforms

Ressa called for communication platforms built by public-interest groups, free of Big Tech control, in the same way public works such as green parks were created. Rappler launched one such effort, Rappler Communities, in 2023 — a mobile app built on Matrix, an open-source, secure and decentralised protocol, which lets the newsroom connect with readers and readers with one another. Other Filipino media were invited to join, and the model is now being extended to outlets in Southeast Asia.

"It's a place where people can be safe in the digital sphere, where they can talk to each other and more importantly, listen to each other so that the great work of democracy happens," she said.