Global temperatures are likely to exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in the next decade, and wealth inequality in the US is at its highest level since World War II. Major companies are driving these system-level risks, threatening the futures and retirement portfolios of millions of Americans.

The 2026 proxy season presents investors an opportunity to mitigate these risks through proxy voting. Majority Action offers two new vote guides for the current proxy season that focus on the climate risks of the AI data center buildout and the inequality risks of excessive executive compensation.

An Overview of Key Issuers' Plans

This memo offers an issuer-by-issuer overview of key companies in the utilities, oil and gas, and technology sectors, summarizing their plans to expand fossil fuels to power new data centers – building new gas power and delaying coal retirement. It also includes an analysis of "behind-the-meter" fossil gas buildout, as well as due diligence questions for investors to ensure their stewardship practices are mitigating the risks of data center buildout. 

Stewarding Workers’ Capital in the Age of System-Level AI Risk

AI in the Boardroom examines how the largest index funds and public pension funds—stewards of hundreds of millions of workers' retirement savings—voted on shareholder proposals addressing AI-related risks during the 2025 proxy season. The report analyzes proxy voting at technology, energy, and infrastructure companies driving AI development, focusing on proposals that raised concerns around board oversight of human rights harms, data center energy and water demands, AI data practices, and high-risk applications in surveillance, military operations, and algorithmic management.

Our analysis reveals that the largest index funds controlling the vast majority of workers' capital were the least supportive of AI governance proposals, despite their heightened exposure to the long-term threats AI poses to economic stability, democratic institutions, and shared prosperity.

How First-Mover Asset Owners and Asset Managers are Responding to AI Risks

While investors have been quick to embrace AI’s investment upside, they have been slower to update their stewardship priorities to respond to the technology’s unprecedented threats. But some asset managers and asset owners on both sides of the Atlantic are leading on the emergent project of AI-related stewardship. This report highlights how first-mover institutional investors are retooling stewardship frameworks, proxy voting guidelines, issuer expectations, and engagement priorities in response to the AI revolution.

How Major Asset Managers’ Index Funds Voted in 2025

This edition of Accountability in the Boardroom evaluates stewardship at the fund level, where responsibility for managing systemic risk is most clearly defined. It examines how broad based index equity funds voted on climate, inequality, and technology accountability during the 2024–2025 proxy season.

This year's report includes a new section on misalignment in proxy voting between major public pension funds and major index funds during the 2025 proxy season.

Why Investors Must Act to Mitigate AI’s System-Level Impacts

This report highlights how unprecedented AI development is creating non-diversifiable, system-level risks that threaten long-term returns and shared prosperity, and presents actionable steps universal owners can take to adopt responsible AI guardrails and protect long-term value.

We are part of a larger effort to organize a cross-sector effort of frontline communities, labor leaders, and responsible investors, to challenge harmful AI infrastructure and establish stronger national investment standards for the AI era.

In the 2025 proxy season, Majority Action worked with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) to lead an impactful climate shareholder resolution at Amazon. Calling on the company to report on how it will meet its climate commitments given its massive data center expansion plans, the proposal garnered support from 20% of shareholders, making it one of the season's most successful environmental resolutions and clearly demonstrating investors' concern about this issue.

Capital, Climate, and Justice in the Wake of Disaster

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina the stakes for capital, climate, and justice are higher than ever. Katrina was not just a humanitarian crisis and natural disaster, it became a blueprint for disaster capitalism, where public were dismantled, workers exploited, and communities left unprotected. The result: long-term risks embedded in markets and portfolios, and a legacy investors must reckon with to avoid repeating.

Today, as climate impacts accelerate and racialized economic inequities deepen, responsible investors face a critical choice: to continue the cycle, or change it.

Majority Action analyzed how shareholder proposals related to freedom of association and collective bargaining, lobbying, political spending, workplace racial and gender equity, workplace safety and working conditions, and technology guardrails performed in the 2025 proxy season relative to previous years.

This report analyzes the 2024 proxy voting performance of the world’s largest asset managers on issues related to inequality and systemic racism.

It examines how the “Big Four”  – BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and Fidelity (as well as Geode, Fidelity’s index fund manager) – voted on 70 shareholder proposals across five categories – freedom of association, workplace safety, racial and gender equity in the workplace, the future of work, and corporate political transparency – that are key to mitigating inequality-related risks and creating a fair and resilient economy rooted in broad-based, inclusive growth. The report also explores the divergence in proxy voting between the largest managers of U.S. defined benefit assets – BlackRock and State Street – and the largest U.S. public pensions, which are among their largest and most important clients.

This report examines the climate proxy voting of the four largest asset managers during the 2024 shareholder season.

It examines how the Big Four asset managers voted on climate shareholder proposals and key climate director elections, takes a deeper dive into the climate voting performance of their ESG-marketed funds, and looks at the divergence between the ten largest public pension plans and the two largest asset managers of defined benefit assets.