Ethiopian-born AI Researcher Timnit Gebru Wins 2026 Right Livelihood Award

#EBR_News Oct 1, 2026
Timnit Gebru, the Ethiopian-born artificial intelligence researcher and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), has been named among the four laureates of the 2026 Right Livelihood Award, often described as the “alternative Nobel Prize”.
The Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Foundation announced the winners on Wednesday, September 30, citing Timnit’s work in challenging the concentration of power in the technology sector.
According to the foundation’s jury statement, quoted by AFP, Timnit was chosen “for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency”.
Born in Ethiopia to a family of Eritrean origin, she is widely known for her research on how bias shapes AI systems and co-founded the group Black in AI in 2017.
Her profile rose sharply in 2020, when, as co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, she co-authored a paper on the risks of bias in large language models, the technology behind many of today’s AI chatbots.
AFP reported, citing the jury, that Google asked her to retract the paper or remove her name from it, and that she was dismissed after refusing to do so without certain guarantees.
She went on to establish DAIR, which, according to the jury, exposes the harms AI systems are already causing in people’s everyday lives, particularly among communities facing discrimination and exclusion.
The recognition comes as governments and investors worldwide debate how far AI development should be regulated and who should control it.
Her work questions the dominance of a small number of Silicon Valley firms over a technology that is increasingly shaping labour markets, finance, public services and business decisions.
For emerging economies such as Ethiopia, which is still shaping its own digital and AI policy, the debate carries practical weight over data ownership, local innovation and the risk of dependence on foreign platforms.
The Right Livelihood Foundation selected the laureates from 200 nominations across 72 countries, according to a report by John Pierce.
The other winners are Pakistani human rights lawyer Jalila Haider, the Rural Women’s Assembly, a movement of more than 178,000 small-scale farmers across 11 Southern African nations, and the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association.
The award was founded in 1980 by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, after the Nobel Foundation declined to create prizes for the environment and international development, AFP reported.
Ole von Uexkull, the foundation’s executive director, said the laureates are women who refused to wait for permission and are rewriting rules that autocrats, patriarchs and Silicon Valley’s most powerful men assumed were theirs to write alone, according to a news report on the announcement.
The awards ceremony will be held in Stockholm on December 1, and the prize comes with long-term support to help the laureates expand their work.
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