September 15, 2026, (Inside AI) — Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa warned that artificial intelligence will strip humanity of its agency unless lawmakers act now to limit it, speaking in Oslo at a conference on threats facing democracies. The Filipino and American journalist, who shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the power of large technology companies, serves as co-chair of the United Nations' international scientific panel on AI.
Ressa's argument rests on a simple claim: the harms are already here, and the window to respond is closing. She said citizens must campaign for regulation to pressure politicians into passing legislation, framing the demand as a matter of public safety rather than speech.
"It is not a freedom of speech issue to ask for regulation. It's a public safety issue," said Ressa, co-founder and CEO of the news outlet Rappler.
"I think we're at that phase where if this doesn't happen, we will tip ... (It) will be beyond our control if we don't step in now," she said.
Her warning lands amid a widening split over how fast AI should advance. Some critics, including U.S. President Donald Trump, have rejected industry calls for regulation, arguing that rules could cost the United States the AI race against China. Ressa dismissed that argument as "good spin."
"China actually puts more safeguards in place for its citizens than Silicon Valley does for the rest of the world. If you're on TikTok, the version of TikTok that is in China has age restrictions," she said.
Her remarks came before Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to slow the rate at which they advance model capabilities, amid mounting fears of misuse. Ressa said the first step toward change is accountability.
"The very first one (step) is to actually make the companies responsible for the damage they've done," she said, welcoming U.S. lawsuits that led Meta Platforms to pay up to $18 billion over the next decade and strictly limit how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram.
She welcomed moves by the European Union and countries led by Australia to impose age limits on social media, but said those measures miss a deeper problem: the tools are addictive for adults too.
"We know this is harmful, so you should remove the addictive features, not just for teenagers, but for all of us," Ressa said. "It isn't just the youth that's being manipulated politically in every country around the world."
Ressa described three waves of AI that have already hit the public. The first captured attention through social media, polarizing societies and isolating individuals. The second hacked biology through intimacy, in the form of chatbots. The third, she said, targets agency itself through agentic and multi-agentic AI, frontier models that do not just pretend to be human but act on our behalf.
Her proposed remedy includes building communication platforms outside Big Tech's control, comparable to public works such as green parks. Rappler launched Rappler Communities in 2023, a mobile app built on Matrix, an open-source, secure and decentralized protocol. It lets the newsroom connect with readers, and readers with each other.
"It's a place where people can be safe in the digital sphere, where they can talk to each other and more importantly, listen to each other so that the great work of democracy happens," she said.
Rappler invited other Filipino media to join and is now extending the model to outlets in Southeast Asia. The approach echoes a longer tradition of public-interest infrastructure, from public broadcasters to community networks, though it faces the same challenge that has dogged such efforts for decades: scaling beyond a committed core of users while platforms owned by trillion-dollar companies control distribution.
Ressa's call for limits also runs into a practical problem. AI models are not confined by borders, and enforcement depends on countries agreeing on what to restrict. The European Union's AI Act has moved furthest, but its rules apply mainly to companies operating in the bloc. Australia's social media age limits, among the first of their kind, have drawn both praise and questions about how they will be verified without collecting more personal data.
Inside AI could not independently verify the details of the Meta settlement or the exact terms of the Australian measures. Ressa's panel, the UN international scientific panel on AI, is tasked with assessing how AI is transforming lives worldwide, a mandate that could shape how governments frame future rules.
For now, Ressa's message is that the burden falls on citizens, not just regulators. She said people must organize and demand change before the technology's next wave arrives, arguing that the cost of waiting will be measured in lost control.
