Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

This week, our new Research Radar warns that the White House’s Genesis Mission to merge federal AI, data, and supercomputing power could sideline universities, communities, and public oversight. In a companion piece, Beth Noveck and Dane Gambrell argue that meaningful algorithmic accountability must go beyond individual rights to include collective oversight through public registers and system-level audits. A new analysis by Stefaan Verhulst and Friederike Schüür highlights why most AI governance still neglects the upstream data layer, where stewardship and protections are weakest. In Spain, Political Watch’s QHLD project shows how transforming parliamentary activity into usable data can expose political blind spots and reconnect citizens with their representatives. Beyond Reboot, we track Congress’s fight over state AI laws, the geopolitics of chips, emerging super PAC influence, Australia’s National AI Plan, and the broader struggle to govern AI as deployment accelerates.

As governments and international bodies race to establish guardrails for AI, most of the global agenda still focuses on managing what AI systems produce—their outputs. This article argues that such an approach is incomplete. The real foundations of safe, rights-respecting, and equitable AI lie upstream in how data is collected, governed, shared, and stewarded. Without integrating mature data governance practices, such as data stewardship and data commons, into AI governance, countries will struggle to protect fundamental rights or ensure that AI’s economic and social benefits are distributed fairly. A future-ready AI governance framework must therefore unite input and output governance into a single, coherent system.

The Trump Administration’s Genesis Mission aims to unify federal supercomputers, datasets, and AI systems into a single national platform for scientific discovery. But as Beth Simone Noveck argues, the plan centralizes unprecedented research power while offering almost no role for universities, communities, or the public, raising urgent questions about access, transparency, and democratic accountability.