Recurring Series
As AI transforms how we work, learn, and govern, what role should universities play? In this wide-ranging conversation, Beth Noveck argues that universities should become laboratories for democratic problem-solving, where students work with communities to address public challenges. She outlines a vision for "democratic AI" that puts public purpose, participation, and impact at the center of technological innovation.
Kazakhstan built one of the world’s most advanced digital governments in less than two decades. Now the country is racing into the next phase: AI-enabled governance, sovereign AI infrastructure, and nationwide AI deployment. But this transition is exposing a harder question beneath the ambition: what happens when countries move toward frontier AI systems before large parts of the population have reliable electricity, affordable internet, laptops, or the skills needed to use AI meaningfully?
Public servants are asking for leadership training at the same moment AI is reshaping government work. This reflection on InnovateUS’s Foundations of Leadership workshop series explores why the most important leadership challenges today are often deeply human ones: creating psychological safety, building real teams instead of loose groups, giving honest feedback, understanding strengths, and helping people perform under pressure and uncertainty. Across five sessions, participants wrestled with the gap between knowing what good leadership looks like and consistently practicing it within real organizations.
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.
In a new piece for the Rethinking Regulation series, Dane Gambrell examines how San Francisco used a custom AI tool developed with Stanford’s RegLab to scan 16 million words of municipal code and identify hundreds of outdated and duplicative reporting requirements across city government. The effort ultimately produced a 351-page ordinance proposing the deletion or consolidation of 174 mandates. The piece offers a grounded look at how AI can help governments make sprawling bureaucratic systems more legible and manageable.
A reflection from Rob Asaro-Angelo, Senior Fellow at the Burnes Center, from the 2026 Code for America Summit on why optimism in government depends on implementation. Drawing from conversations on procurement reform, service delivery, and AI in the public sector, the piece explores how public servants across the country are turning institutional frustration into practical change and why hope becomes credible when people have the tools, authority, and persistence to make systems work better.
In an article originally published in The Times (Scottish Edition), Beth Simone Noveck argues that AI’s most important democratic use is helping governments listen. Drawing on examples from Camden and Scotland, the piece explores how AI could help public institutions process large-scale public input, strengthen participation, and rebuild trust at a time when governments face rising demand and declining capacity.
In the afterword to Gustavo Maia’s forthcoming book Zero-Click Government, Beth Simone Noveck explores the democratic risks and possibilities of anticipatory governance. While supporting efforts to reduce the administrative burdens placed on citizens, she argues that traditional requests and applications also served as an important democratic feedback signal, one that anticipatory systems risk losing when governments act on inferred demand. Her response examines what kinds of participation, transparency, contestation, and institutional learning are needed if public action is increasingly shaped by data and AI.
Congressional information has long been technically public but practically inaccessible, scattered across government sites and locked behind expensive subscription platforms. In response, Zach Florman, Communications Director for Rep. Laura Friedman, created the Capitol Wire tool. The Capitol Wire shows how AI can close that gap by turning floor schedules, bill texts, and legislative updates into real-time alerts and searchable policy briefs that are fast, verifiable, and free. The result is a tool that makes public information more legible for staffers, reporters, and citizens alike, and increases the likelihood of public engagement.
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.
A new entry in our Rethinking Regulation series, this in-depth case study by Dane Gambrell includes an interview with Reeve Bull, who led the state’s regulatory modernization effort. It traces how Virginia used AI to review decades of accumulated rules, cut regulatory requirements by over a third, and make them clearer and more accessible. It shows how governments can pair strong institutional processes with AI to modernize regulation and improve how it works for the public.
A mayor presents a plan, residents push back, and everyone leaves frustrated, not because people weren’t heard, but because listening and engagement happened at the wrong moment. This piece reframes participation as a cycle: listening to set the agenda, engagement to shape decisions, and follow-through to prove input mattered. The example of St. Louis shows how sequencing these stages turns public input into real outcomes, with AI enabling reflection on input at scale.
What happens when governments rely on systems that sound right instead of being right? Drawing on OpenFisca’s spread from France to governments across Europe, Africa, and Oceania, Beth Simone Noveck’s interview with Matti Schneider makes the case for public infrastructure that computes the law, as well as the risks of sidelining it as generative AI scales globally.
AI governance is expanding fast, but not evenly. A new analysis from MIT and Georgetown’s CSET maps over 1,000 governance documents to show that while policies are proliferating, they cluster around familiar risks and sectors, leaving key gaps across socioeconomic impacts, upstream design, and everyday domains. The result, as relayed by research member Yan Zhu, is a more precise picture of what AI governance actually covers, what it still overlooks, and where policymakers should focus in the future.
Across contexts like India, where author Anirudh Dinesh’s family lives, AI chatbots such as xAI’s Grok are increasingly used not to inform but to generate arguments that reinforce existing political views, creating “generative echo chambers.” Unlike passive social media exposure, users actively prompt AI to validate positions, often producing confident but inaccurate claims that go unchecked. While some research suggests AI can moderate views in neutral dialogue, real-world use skews toward advocacy, compounded by low verification and high trust in outputs. The result is that AI may not just reflect polarization, but actively deepen it, depending on how these systems are designed and used.
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