MOTH Unveils New Framework for Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies
The PEPP Framework, presented in MOTH’s Listening to Our Animal Kin Report, represents the first effort to establish principles for the responsible development of technologies that could fundamentally reshape human relationships with the more-than-human world.
November 19th, 2025 – New York, NY – The More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at NYU School of Law yesterday announced the publication of the PEPP Framework (Prepare, Engage, Prevent, Protect), the first comprehensive ethical and legal framework designed specifically to govern nonhuman animal communication technologies.
Developed through a multi-year research project and collaborative process with interdisciplinary experts, including a November 2024 workshop co-hosted by MOTH and Project CETI, the PEPP Framework fills a critical regulatory vacuum. As these technologies proliferate and attract funding, history warns us that well-intentioned technologies have often been misused, co-opted, and weaponized to harm or exploit the very subjects they’re intended to protect. Generative AI and machine learning could exponentially accelerate these dangers. At the same time, our capacity to truly understand nonhuman communication could open pathways to empathy, legal protection, and forms of coexistence we can barely imagine.
Now, when the stakes couldn’t be higher, the PEPP Framework intends to provide an ethical foundation for a field that sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, ecological crisis, and the profound question of what we owe to the beings with whom we share this planet. Co-authored by César Rodríguez-Garavito, Jaqueline Gallant, and Emma Crowe, the PEPP Framework will function as a living, iterative document to adapt as the field evolves.
Virtual Launch Event
The MOTH Program celebrated the publication of the PEPP Framework and its accompanying report, Listening to Our Animal Kin, with a virtual launch event on November 18th, 2025. Event panelists included:
- César Rodríguez-Garavito, Professor of Law & Director of the MOTH Program at New York University School of Law
- Diana Reiss, Cognitive Psychologist, Marine Mammal Scientist, Professor at Hunter College & Founding Trustee of Interspecies Internet
- David Gruber, Marine Biologist & Founder of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative)
The event explored the framework’s key principles, its development process, and its implications for the future of NACT research and human relationships with the more-than-human world.
The complete PEPP Framework and its accompanying report, Listening to Our Animal Kin, is available for download here.
About the MOTH Program
The MOTH (More-Than-Human Life) Program, hosted by NYU School of Law, is an interdisciplinary initiative advancing the rights and well-being for humans, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all. The program brings together legal scholars, scientists, Indigenous leaders, journalists, artists, and other thinkers and doers from across the world.
For more information or press inquiries, please contact:
Emma Crowe
NYU MOTH Program
