Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google control 85% of Canada's cloud market. In a new Reboot Democracy piece, David Eaves and Curtis McCord argue this concentration is a democracy problem, not just a competition one, because public institutions lose leverage over the infrastructure they depend on. The GovLab and InnovateUS launch an AI Coach for Public Engagement that helps public servants move from training to real project planning. And in Part II of their Habermolt response, José Luis Martí and Beth Simone Noveck argue that delegating political judgment to AI agents risks replacing democratic self-government with algorithmic authority.

A new report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project argues that cloud sovereignty is about more than building domestic alternatives. It is about ensuring governments, businesses, and public institutions have autonomy and agency. Using Canada’s highly concentrated cloud market as a case study, the authors explore how procurement policy, competition rules, and interoperability standards could reduce dependence on hyperscalers and create a more competitive marketplace for compute.

In Part II, we examine the project’s core claim that AI agents could represent citizens in democratic deliberation. We argue that representation requires more than predicting preferences, that democratic participation is essential to civic learning and self-government, and that increasingly capable AI agents risk shifting authority away from citizens and toward algorithms. Democracy depends on people governing together, not on delegating judgment to machines.