Center for Humane Technology Lays Off Half Its Staff in Founder-Led Pivot

Center for Humane Technology Trims to a Founder-Led Core

The Center for Humane Technology, the online safety nonprofit co-founded by former Google product manager Tristan Harris and made famous by the documentary The Social Dilemma, is laying off roughly half of its non-founder employees and retiring two of its central programs, according to former staffers who spoke with WIRED.

The cuts amount to nine departures from a non-founder group of 16. Among those leaving are executive director Julie Guirado and senior director of strategy Camille Carlton. The board announced the reorganization last week and framed it as a narrowing of focus rather than a retreat.

The timing is striking. The layoffs land shortly after the organization helped notch a run of major courtroom victories against social media companies. Those cases leaned heavily on research arguing that platforms were designed in ways that keep children tethered to their screens. In other words, a strategy that had begun paying off in court is being wound down at the moment of its clearest vindication.

Why the Board Chose One Path

After years of running in two directions at once, the board concluded that the dual identity had become a liability. Operating as an advocacy outfit fronted by a charismatic founder while also functioning as a think tank that churns out policy papers, board members determined, had stretched the organization too thin to do either job at full strength.

Going forward, the center will concentrate on what it calls founder-led initiatives: public education, targeted briefings, and private coordination. The board said the new structure builds on the group's record of reaching broad audiences and engaging influential decision makers, the kind of work for which a recognizable founder is a natural asset.

Two functions are being eliminated outright: assisting in litigation and evaluating AI tools. The board did not specify a precise number of layoffs in its announcement.

Premal Shah, who chairs the board, offered a blunt rationale. He said in a statement to WIRED that this period of accelerated artificial intelligence risk requires choosing a single strategy, and that the organization had opted to concentrate on the work it has always done best.

• Roughly half of the 16 non-founder staff are departing, nine people in total.
• Executive director Julie Guirado and senior director of strategy Camille Carlton are among those leaving.
• Litigation support and AI tool evaluation are being shut down.
• The remaining focus: public education, targeted briefings, and private coordination.

Tensions That Had Been Simmering for Years

The restructuring did not erupt out of nowhere. Sixteen former workers, most of whom spoke with WIRED earlier this year on condition of anonymity because they worried about professional fallout, described internal debates that had been building for years over the group's direction and strategy.

Those accounts suggest a persistent question: should the center be a movement, defined by its founder's voice and its ability to shape public conversation, or an institution, defined by patient research and legal groundwork? The board's answer is now explicit. It has chosen the movement, or at least the version of it that runs through its founders.

That choice carries real tradeoffs. Founder-led organizations can move quickly, speak with one voice, and command attention in ways that committees cannot. They can also struggle to sustain the unglamorous work, document review, expert affidavits, tool audits, that produced the results the center is now celebrating.

Sixteen former employees speaking over many months is an unusually detailed window into a nonprofit whose public face has always been a single founder. Their accounts, offered anonymously, point to a familiar organizational strain: the gap between a compelling public narrative and the day-to-day machinery required to keep it funded, staffed, and effective.

From Screen Time to AI Risk

In recent years, Harris has moved steadily from warning about compulsive phone use toward a broader alarm about advanced artificial intelligence. He has joined a growing chorus of critics who argue that AI systems could slip beyond human control, describing the danger in stark terms as a potential takeover by the technology itself. In an interview with NBC News last month, he said action is needed immediately, before the window closes.

The center's AI work has ranged widely. It urged the public to sign a prominent petition calling for a pause on AI development. It helped organize a congressional hearing on the risks posed by chatbots. It advised on lawsuits and investigations scrutinizing AI labs and their design choices, including an ongoing case filed against OpenAI by the parents of a teenager.

Notably, one of the functions being cut, evaluating AI tools, sits squarely inside that AI portfolio. The center's new emphasis on briefings and private coordination suggests it intends to influence AI policy through relationships and persuasion rather than through publicly released technical assessments.

What Comes Next

For the online safety movement the center helped ignite, the signal is mixed. On one hand, the group is shrinking at a moment when scrutiny of both social media and AI is intensifying. On the other, its courtroom victories are now on the record, cited in fights that will continue well beyond the organization's own payroll.

For Harris, the pivot consolidates a role he has occupied for years: the explainer-in-chief, translating technical risk into language that parents, lawmakers, and executives can act on. Whether a smaller, founder-driven operation can keep pace with an industry that moves on quarterly cycles is an open question.

What is not in doubt is that the group's internal argument has now been settled by its board, and the answer carries consequences not only for the people packing up their desks, but for how the broader movement against addictive and unchecked technology organizes itself from here.

This article is based on reporting by Wired. Read the original article.