Treat the hidden workforce that produces AI — content moderators, data labellers, gig drivers whose data trains routing systems, algorithmically managed warehouse and platform workers — as the labour movement organises any other industrial workforce: build associations and unions, contest contracts, win legal status, and confront the named corporate buyer at the top of the chain. The point of leverage is that this labour is structurally necessary to the AI product, so a credible threat to withdraw it is a credible threat to the product.
An actor chooses this strategy because policy advocacy alone cannot move the conditions under which AI is actually built — the supply chain runs through low-wage jurisdictions deliberately chosen for distance from regulation. A workers' organisation can do what an NGO cannot: extract a binding agreement that changes the conditions of the work, force a buyer to acknowledge an employment relationship it has structured itself out of, and produce first-person testimony of harm with standing in court.
It trades off the slowness of building real organisations in hostile labour environments — many of the workforces are precarious, often outsourced through multi-tier vendors, in countries where union recognition is itself a fight. Wins are concentrated where labour law already protects organising; transnational solidarity is required to close the supply-chain loop.