Solidarity AI

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We are told AI is coming whether we like it or not. But someone builds these systems. Someone owns them. Someone pays for them. Who labels the data that trains them? Who decides whether a rider keeps their job? What happens when the companies behind AI grow powerful enough to capture the state and supply the tools of surveillance and authoritarian rule? And who gets to say no?

What would it mean to design artificial intelligence in service of communal care, climate justice, and local values? It takes sharp critique, and it also takes dispersed communities joining forces to build collective power. We need both.

The 2026 Solidarity AI conference at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok brings together researchers, cooperative leaders and worker-owners, AI developers, feminist, queer, and disability rights advocates, policy researchers, labor organizers, journalists, artists, and people speaking from several faith traditions to take up these questions.

Co-convened by PCC Global and PCC Thailand, in partnership with Chulalongkorn University and regional allies, the conference extends last year’s conversation in Istanbul. That event asked how cooperatives could shape AI around their own principles, rather than adapting Big Tech’s tools, by intervening in the ecosystems that make up AI’s infrastructure.

Now, the conversation turns to Asia. In regions long positioned on the receiving end of global tech flows, digital systems increasingly restructure labor, determining who is paid, tracked, replaced, and rendered invisible. Through invited talks, reverse panels, design clinics, hands-on workshops, a collectively written set of Bangkok Theses, and a shared glossary of Solidarity AI, the conference grounds scholarship in lived experience and turns it into concrete steps toward worker power and new experiments in the spaces the AI giants leave open.

Solidarity AI starts from three gaps. The terms of the AI debate are still set in the Global North. Governance is offered without ownership, yet communities need legally binding refusal rights and oversight independent of the agency being governed. And the people who build AI and live under it are treated as users or data points rather than as decision-makers.

Right now, a handful of companies decide how AI is built and used. We want to know what changes when the people who live with it make those calls, and what they need to create something better together. The workers who label the data, maintain the systems, and get managed by them should control them, from the mines to the code. Data annotators, drivers, and care workers are not research subjects. They are already designing the alternatives. This matters in daily life. AI decides whether a farmer gets a fair price, whether a care worker’s schedule makes sense, whether a trans person gets flagged at an ID check, and whether a regional language shows up online at all. We will also ask what solidarity looks like when it is written into bylaws, business models, infrastructure, and cross-border alliances.

Solidarity is a starting point for economic democracy. People must have meaningful power over the technologies that shape their work and lives. Mutual support and shared resources can lay the foundations for collective ownership, democratic governance, and a fair distribution of benefits and costs. The task is to turn solidarity into durable institutions through which workers and communities can exercise that power.

These ideas take shape through “solidarity stacks,” namely interconnected layers of technology, governance, and labor systems that are collectively owned, locally governed, and designed to serve social rather than extractive ends. Communities, universities, cooperatives, city governments, and public agencies build them from the ground up, often as narrow AI that does one job well, usually a job too small or too unprofitable for the big companies to bother with. In Switzerland, the federal government and public universities released Apertus, a fully open language model trained in more than a thousand languages. Transkribus, an AI platform used by archives around the world, is run by READ-COOP, an AI cooperative owned by its users. In Singapore, a public research program built SEA-LION so that AI understands Thai, Bahasa, Vietnamese, and other Southeast Asian languages. These projects meet people’s needs without handing control to a tech giant, and they keep the people who use them in charge.

This vision is already taking shape. From farmer-led data cooperatives in India to Vietnam’s national AI stack, and from multilingual systems in Indonesia and Malaysia to worker organizing in the Philippines and platform cooperatives in Spain, each example offers a concrete glimpse of what is possible. In Bangkok, you will hear about CoRE Stack, a climate-resilience platform in rural India that 500 landscape stewards are turning into a cooperative they run themselves; Origins Co-op, a regenerative rubber farming network in Thailand whose members own and govern their farm data; Aqsa Farm, a cooperative strengthening local food systems in Indonesia; and the Thai Therapy Spa at Home collective.

This vision grows from Asian and Global South traditions that have long pushed back against extraction and quick technical fixes. Buddhist ethics centers compassion and interdependence. Thailand’s sufficiency economy rejects growth at any cost. Gandhian thought favors decentralization and restraint. Ambedkarite critique asks who is excluded and whose voices are missing. Feminist and queer thinkers show how gender, sexuality, caste, class, and disability compound one another, and how AI systems that misgender, flag, or erase queer and trans people repeat those hierarchies.

Thailand’s cooperative movement goes back to 1916, when Prince Bidyalongkorn, known as the “Father of Thai Cooperatives,” helped found the first cooperative at Wat Chan in Phitsanulok. Today these values take concrete form in solidarity-economy initiatives: SAFETist Farm, an urban farming collective promoting food security and environmental learning; Zero Baht Plus Shop, where residents exchange sorted waste for goods in a circular community economy; Dignity Returns, a worker-owned garment factory founded by laid-off workers; TechTransThai, a community-driven technology initiative supporting transgender people through free software, decentralized data tools, and public-interest digital projects; and the Credit Union League of Thailand (CULT), a national federation representing over one million members in community-based financial institutions.

At Solidarity AI, these projects meet, learn from each other, and start imagining and building a different future. We came to be told AI was inevitable. We leave with commitments to make something else. So we ask every participating institution: what would you need to change, and what could you contribute, to make that future real? Solidarity forever.

Partners and Support
Solidarity AI is convened by Chulalongkorn University and the Platform Cooperativism Consortium Global (PCC) and PCC Thailand, with the support of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Thailand office and the Asian Universities Alliance (AUA).

Through AUA’s support, ten selected participants from AUA member universities will receive travel and accommodation to attend the conference. AUA participants will have opportunities to present papers, join panel discussions, participate in workshops, and contribute to regional dialogue on AI, cooperation, and solidarity economies.

Suggested Hotels:
1. Montien Hotel
54 Surawong Rd, Si Lom, Bang Rak, Bangkok 10500
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2. 56 Surawong
56 Surawong Rd, Si Lom, Bang Rak, Bangkok 10500
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3. The Raya Surawong
24–30 Surawong Rd, Si Phraya, Bang Rak, Bangkok 10500
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4. Mandarin Hotel
662 Rama IV Rd, Maha Phruttharam, Bang Rak, Bangkok 10500
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5. ibis Bangkok Siam
927 Rama I Rd, Wang Mai, Pathum Wan, Bangkok 10330
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6. Mercure Bangkok Siam
927 Rama I Rd, Wang Mai, Pathum Wan, Bangkok 10330
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7. Pathumwan Princess
444 Phaya Thai Rd, Wang Mai, Pathum Wan, Bangkok 10330
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Conference Advisory Board:
Mark Graham, Evren Aydogan, Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, Rafael Grohmann, Giuseppe Guerini, Veronyka Gimenes, Antonio Casilli, Kaya Genç, Malavika Jayaram, Luca Cominassi, Gustavo Mendes