Kevin Bankston is Senior Advisor on AI Governance for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization fighting to protect civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age. A veteran civil society leader and tech executive with over two decades of experience at the intersection of emerging tech, law, and policy, he supports CDT’s AI Governance Lab in its mission to advance robust solutions that address AI risks.
Kevin has previously served in a wide range of roles across digital civil society, including a prior stint at CDT. First, as a Justice William Brennan First Amendment Fellow attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, he helped litigate foundational Internet free speech cases. He then spent nearly a decade at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, leading EFF’s advocacy around internet and cellphone surveillance; his court arguments against warrantless wiretapping were featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary CitizenFour.
Turning to the DC policy world, Kevin then served as Director of CDT’s Free Expression Project where he led a successful coalition of tech companies and civil society advocates in demanding greater transparency around foreign intelligence surveillance. More recently, Kevin was Director of the Open Technology Institute at New America, where his work to further OTI’s mission of ensuring that all communities have access to an open and secure Internet led to him being named by Washingtonian magazine as one of DC’s 100 top tech leaders of 2017.
Immediately prior to rejoining CDT to support its AI work, Kevin spent four years at Meta Platforms Inc. as its first AI Policy Director, founding the AI Policy team and serving as a founding leader in Meta’s Responsible AI product organization. There, he led initiatives establishing the company’s approach to responsible AI development and emerging AI policy proposals, while learning practical lessons about the inner workings of AI and Big Tech to apply in future advocacy.
Kevin is currently an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center where he teaches on the emerging law and policy around generative AI. He is also a Truman Security Fellow with the Truman National Security Project, and studies the influence of science fiction on the evolution of technology and society as a fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. He was previously a nonresidential fellow with Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society, and served for over a decade as a board member of the First Amendment Coalition. He received his JD at the University of Southern California Law School and his BA at the University of Texas at Austin.
Will the Open Internet Survive the War on Bots? Mapping the Debate Over “AI Preferences”
When should individuals and organizations be able to use automated tools or “bots” to collect data from or interact with openly published websites — whether we call it “scraping”, “crawling,” or simply automated data collection?
