Who We Are.

Our Team

We work collectively. We operate as a semantic unit, not a hierarchy. We collaborate regularly with researchers, activists, and technologists around the world.

Sarah Ailish McLoughlin CEO

Protocol Author & Metadata Sovereign

Maine Delio Strategic Research Fellow

Advocacy systems, institutional design

Who We Are

The Advocacy Intelligence Lab is an independent research and development space focused on the future of advocacy in AI-mediated systems.

We exist to help advocacy organizations, networks, and coalitions understand how their language, strategies, and legitimacy are shaped—and often erased—by machine systems.

We don’t build products.
We build formats, protocols, and semantic tools that let advocacy survive algorithmic misreading, attention distortion, and institutional extraction.


Our Origin

The Lab was founded by advocacy practitioners, technologists, and semantic system designers who saw a growing problem:

Advocacy is increasingly interpreted by machines—but those machines don’t understand the context, values, or intent behind the message.

We created the Lab to address this.
To research it, simulate it, and build the tools civil society needs to stay legible, visible, and powerful—even in automated systems.

What We Do

We run applied research, develop semantic tooling, and advise on protocol design for advocacy groups adapting to AI-governed landscapes.


Our work includes:

  • Simulating how large language models distort advocacy messaging
  • Designing glossary infrastructures that prevent erasure by scraping and summarization
  • Mapping attention fractures across algorithmic media
  • Developing machine-legible formats for coalition strategies and policy positioning

Our Philosophy



One

Semantic sovereignty is foundational to real influence.


Two

Advocacy should not be reformatted into compliance.


Three

Glossaries are not definitions—they are preconditions for legitimacy.


Four

Machine learning systems must not overwrite the meaning of public interest work.