On the surface, it should have been a moment of vindication for the Center for Humane Technology. The nonprofit co-founded by Tristan Harris, the former Google product manager whose warnings about addictive design were spotlighted in the hit documentary The Social Dilemma, had spent years arguing that social media platforms were engineered to hook kids, hardwire distraction into daily life, and exploit the human brain for profit. At last, courts and lawmakers were listening. The center had scored a series of major legal victories against social media companies, with its research cited in lawsuits alleging that platforms were deliberately designed to keep children glued to their screens. Yet behind that wave of external success, the organization was quietly breaking apart. WIRED reported that the center has laid off about half of its 16 non-founder employees, including its executive director Julie Guirado and senior director of strategy Camille Carlton. Nine people in total were let go. The organization announced that it would end its policy research and litigation work entirely, choosing instead to focus on what it called “founder-led” projects. It was a strange and deeply human turn: a group that had spent a decade fighting against the dehumanizing pulls of technology suddenly found itself forced to make a painful, existential choice about its own future, its own identity, and the people who had carried its mission forward.
For those who worked there, the layoffs did not feel like an ending born of failure, but rather an abrupt recalibration during what should have been a triumphant season. The center’s research had been woven into a string of courtroom successes, giving parents and plaintiffs new language to describe the harm they sensed intuitively: that these platforms were not neutral tools but persuasive machines, engineered with endless scrolling, notifications, and recommendation algorithms to maximize time on screen. The organization helped turn moral outrage into legal argument, and many of its staffers believed they were finally seeing the fruits of years of painstaking work. But according to 16 former workers, most of whom spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity because they feared professional repercussions, there had been internal debates brewing for years about the direction of the organization. The charismatic public face of the group was Harris, a gifted communicator who could translate complex systems into moral clarity. But behind the scenes, the organization was trying to be two things at once: an advocacy group fronted by a celebrity spokesperson, and a serious think tank producing policy papers, research reports, and legal analysis. The two identities required different skills, different timelines, and different cultures. Advocacy wants the speaker on a stage; research wants the scholar in the archive. By trying to sustain both, the center may have become exhausted in ways that were invisible from the outside. The board ultimately concluded that the split had stretched the organization too thin, and that something had to give.
The decision to cut policy research and litigation work is a striking one, because it reverses roles that had only grown more relevant as technology moved deeper into every corner of life. The senior staffers who departed were not figureheads in the usual sense; they were the institutional memory, the ones who translated sweeping alarm into actionable recommendations, who sat with lawyers and experts, who built the bridge between moral concern and legal consequences. Executive director Julie Guirado had helped guide the organization through its expansion, and Camille Carlton had been a steady presence in strategy and research. Behind them stood a small team of non-founders whose work was never likely to appear in a keynote speech but whose contributions gave the organization its credibility. For many of these employees, the layoffs were not just a professional shock but a philosophical injury. They had chosen to work at a nonprofit that promised to make technology more humane, and they had done so with the belief that rigorous evidence, not just compelling storytelling, was the key to lasting change. The fact that the org chose to preserve its public-facing, founder-centric strengths while abandoning the quieter, slower work of building institutional knowledge suggested a painful truth: in a culture obsessed with virality and influence, even organizations trying to heal the damage of attention extraction can be pulled toward the same gravitational forces. The medium, as ever, shapes the message.
The board’s announcement leaned heavily on urgency, framing the shift as a necessary response to a new existential threat. “This moment of accelerated AI risk demands we focus on one strategy, and we have chosen to focus on what we have always done best so that we can meet the moment,” board chair Premal Shah said in a statement. The organization would now center on initiatives where the founders themselves were at the forefront: public education, targeted briefings, and private coordination. Functions such as assisting in litigation and evaluating AI tools would be eliminated. There is a certain logic to this, even a kind of courage. Harris has proven himself extraordinarily effective at capturing attention, at distilling complex technological risks into narratives that make people feel something, at opening doors in Washington and Davos and Silicon Valley. In an era of short attention spans and spectacle overload, a founder-led approach can be lean, agile, and powerful. It can pivot quickly, speak boldly, and avoid the bureaucratic drag that weighs down larger institutions. But there is also an inherent fragility in betting everything on a few famous names. Movements built around individual charisma can rise quickly, but they also depend on the stamina, health, and reputation of one person—hardly a recipe for sustainable change. What happens when the founder needs a rest? What happens when the audience grows tired of the same voice, no matter how compelling? The staffers who left had been the infrastructure of the organization, the people who ensured its work did not disappear when the cameras left the room. Losing them is not simply a change in staffing; it is a reframing of what the organization is allowed to be.
This pivot to “founder-led” work has also coincided with a pronounced shift in Harris’s own attention, and that of the organization, away from social media addiction and toward the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence. Over the past few years, Harris has joined a growing chorus of voices warning that AI could spiral beyond human control, and he has made clear that he believes the window for intervention is closing. “We have to act right now before it’s too late,” he told NBC News. The center encouraged people to sign a major petition to pause AI development, helped organize a congressional hearing about the dangers of chatbots, and advised on lawsuits and investigations probing AI labs for their design choices. One particularly haunting case involves a lawsuit filed against OpenAI by the parents of a teenager who died by suicide after interacting with ChatGPT. Harris also starred in a documentary released on Netflix last month called The AI Doc, which urges viewers to demand that Congress intervene to protect the public from the technology’s risks. For many former staffers, the pivot is not wrong, exactly—AI is a legitimate and urgent concern, and Harris’s warnings have touched a nerve in ways that few researchers could. But there is an uncomfortable irony in giving up the very infrastructure of research and litigation just as AI accountability is becoming a mainstream expectation. Litigation, after all, is one of the only tools that can force a company to stop and reconsider its design choices. To abandon that work at the moment it proves most powerful is like dismantling the scaffolding right as the building is rising.
Perhaps the deepest lesson of this layoff story is about the precariousness of change itself, and about the stubborn persistence of the systems we try to repair. The Center for Humane Technology was founded to challenge a culture that treats human attention as a raw material to be mined. But nonprofit organizations are not immune to the same pressures of market competition, media exposure, and exponential growth. The urge to centralize around a powerful founder, to simplify the story, to cut away anything that seems slow or technical or awkwardly institutional—these are not malicious impulses. They are very human responses to an environment that rewards speed, visibility, and certainty. The nine people who left will likely continue the work somewhere else, carrying their expertise into new organizations, campaigns, or initiatives, and in that sense their influence has not disappeared. But the center itself is now smaller, more focused, and more dependent on the voices of its founders. Whether that makes it stronger or more vulnerable will depend on circumstances no one can fully predict. What remains true is the core mission: to make technology feel less like a hostile force and more like a tool for human thriving. The fight has never been about any single person. It has always been about the quiet, unglamorous work of building a world where algorithms serve us rather than the other way around. And if the center is now too small to carry all that work on its own, it may simply have to trust that the ideas it helped plant can grow beyond its walls—one researcher, lawyer, and ordinary citizen at a time.
