Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

A new WHO discussion paper explores how AI can accelerate research synthesis and keep evidence continuously up to date. Elana Banin welcomes the push to use AI to strengthen the evidence-to-policy pipeline, but argues the more consequential question is whether AI will redefine what counts as evidence in the first place. The harder constraint will ultimately be institutional, as most health workers lack the training and infrastructure to adopt these tools. Government decision-makers must start building the processes to test AI outputs against frontline knowledge and the capacity to make that adoption defensible.

A high school journalist reflects on who is shaping the public conversation about AI. While headlines focus on risk and disruption, everyday uses of AI are already helping families access benefits, students learn, and cities deliver services. The gap, Amedeo Bettauer argues, is in between those whose experiences count in defining the debate and those in power who seek out diverse experiences.

Dane Gambrell interviews Reeve Bull on how Virginia used AI to analyze hundreds of thousands of regulatory requirements, cutting 35.7% of them and saving an estimated $1.4 billion annually, but only after years of human groundwork. Wietse Van Ransbeeck shows how AI is making large-scale listening usable, helping governments process tens of thousands of public inputs by matching participation to the policy cycle. And Basque MP Xabier Barandiaran describes how the Basque Country is embedding participation directly into law, making collaboration traceable and enforceable, not optional. Elsewhere, a congressional staffer builds his own AI tools in the absence of institutional support, and the FDA pilots real-time monitoring of clinical trials. This and more in this week's News that Caught Our Eye