Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

A new paper urges universities to resist the uncritical adoption of AI, arguing that existing research integrity standards already prohibit much of what institutions are normalizing. Beth Simone Noveck's diagnosis is sharp: vendor dependency, opacity, and hype are reshaping public institutions from the inside. But for governments, refusal isn’t an option. The real question is not whether to adopt AI, but who controls it and on what terms.

As governments move from AI pilots to workforce-wide access, the hardest questions are practical: What does it cost at scale? Who gets access? How do you log usage and manage risk? How do we pair access with training so it’s safe — and actually useful?Drawing on lessons from New Jersey and Boston, this post outlines how to structure AI deployment using usage-based pricing, cloud infrastructure you control, and training designed to drive real impact.

This week on Reboot Democracy, Max Stier explores how AI can strengthen internal government culture by building real-time recognition systems for civil servants. Elana Banin examines the UbuntuGuard benchmark, arguing that AI safety must be tested against locally defined public-sector rules rather than inferred from English-language standards. Giulio Quaggiotto reflects on Argentina’s AI-supported “Questions Tree” experiment to rethink how governments build strategy. Beyond Reboot, Colombia’s AI-presented candidate Gaitana enters an Indigenous election, the Pentagon pressures Anthropic to loosen military guardrails, global experts release the 2026 International AI Safety Report, governments expand AI-assisted legislative drafting, and India convenes the first major Global South AI summit.