Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

As governments rush to regulate AI, many governance frameworks still overlook what happens when people are harmed. This piece argues that AI governance will be tested by legal systems already struggling to deliver equal access to justice. Drawing on the recent report "A People-Centered Justice Approach to Implementing AI Governance," examples from Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States make the case for bringing courts, legal aid organizations, and justice institutions into the center of AI governance design.

How do you find the rules a city no longer needs? In San Francisco, AI helped, scanning 16 million words of municipal code to surface 174 outdated reporting requirements. In a new Reboot Democracy piece, Dane Gambrell walks through how the city partnered with Stanford's RegLab to draft a 351-page cleanup ordinance. Beth Simone Noveck makes the case in the Times - Scottish Edition that AI's most important democratic role may be helping governments listen at scale, drawing on Camden and Scotland. Elif Davutoglu examines Türkiye's new YAZEK system, which requires educators to formally declare every AI tool they use in classrooms, and the gap between procedural compliance and substantive oversight. And from the Code for America Summit, Robert Asaro-Angelo argues that hope in public service becomes credible when civil servants have the authority and tools to fix systems from within.

As governments search for ways to operationalize AI ethics inside public institutions, Türkiye’s new YAZEK system offers an early example of what procedural AI governance can look like in practice. The piece examines how the Ministry of Education embedded mandatory AI ethics declarations into everyday administrative workflows, while also exploring the system’s limits around verification, oversight, and remedy when automated systems cause harm.