Version 1.0 — Published 2026
What we believe. Why we exist.
This document states what Youth for Responsible AI believes and why. It will be updated as the evidence changes.
AI's benefits are concentrating. This is the expected outcome of building AI to maximize returns for shareholders.
Five companies control 71% of the world's AI compute, up from 63% eighteen months earlier. US private AI investment reached $285.9 billion in 2025. The rest of the world received a rounding error.
Epoch AI 2025; Stanford HAI 2026 AI Index
The communities that will be most transformed by AI are the least represented in building it.
93% of the world's languages are absent from AI training data. Facial recognition systems misidentify dark-skinned faces 10 to 100 times more often than light-skinned ones. The Foundation Model Transparency Index dropped from 58 to 40 in a single year.
Nature 2025; MIT Sloan; Stanford HAI 2026
Young people will live longest with the consequences of AI decisions being made today — and they are almost entirely absent from those decisions.
AI governance, model development, and infrastructure investment are led overwhelmingly by people over 40 in a handful of wealthy countries. The communities that will inherit AI's consequences are not at the table.
AI literacy is not a luxury. AI systems already make decisions about jobs, loans, content, and public services. Communities that cannot read those decisions are subject to them.
Automated systems screen job applicants, approve or deny loans, moderate speech, and allocate public resources. These decisions are opaque, consequential, and largely unchallenged because most people lack the vocabulary to question them.
AI Now Institute 2025
The window to build informed public understanding of AI is closing. The compute concentration ratio moved from 63% to 71% in eighteen months. The trend is not slowing.
The OECD and the UN both concluded in 2024 that AI must be governed as public commons. The policy consensus exists. The implementation does not. Communities like this one are part of filling that gap.
OECD.AI 2025; UN Governing AI for Humanity 2024