The most important word in AI discourse right now? “Humans.”

This year, the story AI companies have been telling about AI has been changing – more and more it’s becoming a story about humans. “The world has got to be built for people and be better for people,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview in May. AI systems need to be “shaped by human intent, accountable to human oversight, and ultimately subordinate to human goals,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman wrote in a recent blog post. And Anthropic’s latest ad, “There’s hope in hard questions,” asks over photographs of people: “How do we really ensure that what we’re aiming to achieve really does benefit the majority of people?”

This shift to “humans” isn’t surprising. The public isn’t reacting to predictions anymore – it’s reacting to experience, and that’s changing the sentiment around the technology. AI is now part of how we work, think, and relate. And while it may be helping us in certain spheres – streamlining menial work tasks, accelerating scientific discovery – it’s also reshaping the more intimate parts of our lives, including our cognitive capacities, our relationships, our contributions to society, our identities, and even our inner worlds. This raises uncomfortable questions about what the future holds for us as humans – questions that all of us, including AI leaders, are grappling with.

Through our work on “AI and What Makes Us Human,” Center for Humane Technology is striving to address those questions – and provide the public with solutions. To keep you informed on this process, I’ve written an open letter that covers where we’ve been on this journey to protect our humanity in the age of AI, and where we’re going next.

But what does it mean to put humans at the center of the AI revolution, in a practical way? As our co-founder Randima Fernando explains in a recent Your Undivided Attention podcast episode, it means understanding what’s driving a broken tech development paradigm, and then establishing a set of principles that can steer better, more humane technology. This requires us to move beyond a narrow set of optimization goals, and take a big picture approach to tech development. “If we use a systems lens,” Randima says, “That allows us to make much better predictions.” You can listen to the full “Principles of Humane Technology” conversation here.

One of the most urgent fields we can apply the Principles of Humane Tech to is today’s human-like design in AI. Our Project Director of AI Psychosocial Evaluations Imran Khan wrote in a recent CHT Substack piece, human-like design in AI is not an accident. “Warmth sells… there’s an incentive to build AIs that genuinely seem to get us.” But what impact does this have on human psychology, and our automatic assumptions about the world around us? What within us is being exploited as a result of these design choices?

Moving humans to the center of the AI conversation is the step society needed to take in 2026. And it’s a reminder that, through rigorous debate and public effort, we can begin to shift the trajectory of this technology toward something that has a chance of actually benefitting the public. CHT will be bringing you more resources in the coming weeks on how humans can – and must – remain the focus in the AI revolution. I look forward to sharing more soon.

Until then,

Julie Guirado

Executive Director

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