Recurring Series

News That Caught Our Eye

Showing 15 of 102 results in series "News That Caught Our Eye"

Reboot Weekly Special Edition: Who Does the Reasoning Now?

Across elections, work, and education, AI is performing more of the reasoning people once had to do themselves. But the institutions built for a world where humans did that reasoning haven't caught up. This week, candidates learned how to influence chatbot answers before voters ever reach a website. Amazon cut another 14,000 jobs while investing heavily in AI. And a Massachusetts school district doubled down on teaching students the rote mathematics AI already performs better than humans. Meanwhile, new global data suggest AI increasingly rewards judgment while automating routine work. Reboot will take some time off in August, so an extra hefty News that Caught Our Eye this week

Published on Jul 23, 2026 by Beth Simone Noveck

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: Mississippi's Framework Test, What Wars Are Fought Over, and Building UX Capacity

Mississippi has a statewide AI framework, but Dr. Kollin Napier argues that the real test starts the next day. In a new Reboot Democracy piece, he reflects on what it takes to move from published policy to actual adoption: sustained investment in workforce training, governance, staffing, and implementation capacity. From the AI Risk Explorer SPAR project, Elana Banin and colleagues argue that AI is pulling commercial tech firms into military operations and making cloud infrastructure, data centers, subsea cables, and AI models strategic targets. And a new piece from U.S. Digital Response and InnovateUS outlines what it takes to build UX capacity in government: not more technology, but leadership, cross-agency collaboration, and starting with residents

Published on Jul 9, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly Special Edition: AI and The Race to Save Democracy

Available now in print and in audiobook! "Reboot: AI and The Race to Save Democracy" by Beth Simone Noveck

Published on Jul 1, 2026 by Beth Simone Noveck

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: 85% Cloud Lock-In, an AI Coach for Public Servants, and Why AI Shouldn't Vote

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.

Published on Jun 25, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly Special: Beth Noveck's Reboot Launches Next Week — A Blueprint for Democratic AI

Democracy needs a moonshot — and Beth Noveck's new book offers the blueprint. Launching next week from Yale University Press, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy makes the case that AI can strengthen democratic institutions when designed for public purpose, governed responsibly, and built to help governments listen, decide, and act more effectively. This special edition gathers the pre-launch conversation: Brookings TechTank with Darrell West, the Tavis Smiley Show, and Rick Flynn Presents, with feature interviews in Route Fifty and The Herald — alongside her new Reboot Democracy essay with José L. Martí, which critiques Habermolt, an experimental project that uses AI agents to deliberate and vote. Elana Banin sits down with Anya Kamenetz to ask why families have been largely absent from AI policy debates, and the Barcelona Public-Interest AI Accelerator team reflects on what it takes to train the next generation of AI-and-democracy leaders.

Published on Jun 18, 2026 by Elana Banin

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: The World Cup Edition

What can the World Cup's controversial VAR replay system teach us about deploying AI in government? In a new Reboot Democracy piece, Anirudh Dinesh argues that VAR's failures, such as addressing the wrong problem, ignoring stakeholder input, and eroding the human experience, are the same failures civic AI keeps making. Sarah Sachs and Tal Roded describe how the Block Party team turned 20 years of Manhattan Community Board 3 resolutions into a searchable public archive: democratic AI in practice. And in two new conversations, Beth Simone Noveck argues that universities should become laboratories for democratic problem-solving, and that AI should be judged not by efficiency alone but by whether it improves lives, expands participation, and helps institutions solve public problems.

Published on Jun 11, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: 10 Data Center Questions, Kazakhstan's AI Frontier, and Reimagining Universities

Deborah Stine outlines 10 questions about electricity demand, water use, workforce impacts, and community benefit agreements that communities should ask before construction begins. Gulnaz Kordanova examines Kazakhstan's rapid expansion from digital government into sovereign AI infrastructure, warning that gaps in connectivity, devices, and digital literacy could deepen inequality in the AI era. Anita McGahan argues that the most urgent AI-era leadership challenges in government are deeply human ones — psychological safety, honest feedback, and helping people perform under uncertainty. Debates over tech infrastructure continue, with David Eaves calling for interoperable cloud markets and the European Commission unveiling a digital autonomy package.

Published on Jun 4, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: Justice Systems, the Six-Word Problem, and 16 Members of Congress

When an AI system harms someone, who decides what justice looks like? In a new Reboot Democracy piece, Nate Edwards argues that AI governance frameworks routinely overlook this question, leaving courts, ombudsmen, and legal aid offices to determine whether AI accountability actually means anything in practice. AI for Impact Fellows Sai Punith Kolla and Swaapnika Chowdary Cherukuru introduce Public Voice, a piloted InnovateUS voice-based tool designed to measure whether AI learning is changing how public professionals actually work. And from a closed-door Bellagio convening with 16 members of Congress, Mariana Becerra reflects on what an unusually candid bipartisan conversation about AI revealed about the gap between policy and frontline practice.

Published on May 28, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: Decluttering San Francisco, AI in Turkish Schools, and Hope at Code for America

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.

Published on May 21, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: Zero-Click Government, the Capitol Wire, and AI's Kichwa Problem

What if the State acted on what it already knows about you, rather than waiting for you to fill out a form? In a new commentary, Beth Simone Noveck previews Gustavo Maio's new book and argues that moving toward zero-click government requires a double-click on participation. Zachary Florman shows how The Capitol Wire turns scattered congressional documents into real-time legislative intelligence. Pompeu Fabra's Rodrigo Cetina-Presuel, Marco Tello, and Jose Martinez-Sierra examine why Ecuador's judiciary paused the use of AI in Indigenous-language cases. This and more from this week's Reboot News That Caught Our Eye.

Published on May 14, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: Testing Whether AI Can Deliver Public Value

This week on Reboot Democracy, Elana Banin examines World Health Organization research on how AI could transform evidence-informed policymaking, while warning that the harder challenge is whether ministries can build the capacity to align with frontline realities. Amedeo Bettauer argues that the public conversation on AI is being shaped by a narrow “messenger class,” leaving students, workers, and families already using these tools largely absent from the debate. And the Center for AI and Digital Policy's AI Index finds that, across 90 countries, governments increasingly legislate AI governance principles such as fairness and transparency; the gaps lie in implementation, oversight, and public-sector capacity. Elsewhere, states experiment with AI in benefits systems and child welfare, the Labor Department prepares a workforce data hub to track AI’s economic effects, and South Africa withdraws its national AI policy after fabricated AI-generated citations expose the risks of weak institutional review. This and more in this week’s News That Caught Our Eye.

Published on May 7, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: Governments Use AI to Simplify Rules and Strengthen Participation

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

Published on Apr 30, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: 100 Interns, 1,000 Policies, 1,500 Workers, 100,000 Learners—AI, Government, and Democracy by the Numbers

Lots of numbers in this week's News that Caught Our Eye: Beth Simone Noveck interviews Matti Schneider of OpenFisca about why we may be over-investing in "100 interns on cocaine" aka GenAI when what we need are more computational legal systems. Yan Zhu maps over 1,000 AI governance documents, revealing proliferating policies but major gaps. Summer Mothwood explains how California used AI to make sense of suggestions from 1500 state workers about how to improve government. Beyond Reboot, Brookings finds federal AI use rising but uneven across agencies, while New York scales AI training to over 100,000 workers. Elsewhere, reporting on ICE’s geotracking system and proposed limits on license plate data underscores growing scrutiny of surveillance, while research on AI “personalities” and worker pushback in China points to emerging risks in decision-making and labor.

Published on Apr 23, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: Building Resilient Systems, Designing Public-Interest AI, and Confronting Generative Polarization

This week on Reboot Democracy, Beth Simone Noveck shows how tools like GrantWell can expand access to public funding and model public-interest AI. Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson warn that AI is becoming society’s operating system, requiring resilience as shared infrastructure. Anirudh Dinesh examines how generative AI fuels “echo chambers,” reinforcing existing beliefs. Beyond Reboot, MIT Risk Review, and CEST maps gaps in governance frameworks, while the Center for AI and Digital Policy tracks global progress toward democratic AI. Partnership on AI examines how Pennsylvania and SEIU Local 668 negotiated protections for nearly 10,000 state employees, and the European Commission Joint Research Centre outlines a framework for scaling public-sector AI. Emerging tools from New Jersey Innovation Authority’s NJ EASE to DARPA’s agent communication initiative show AI moving from experimentation to infrastructure, as Anthropic highlights rising cybersecurity risks.

Published on Apr 16, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell

News That Caught Our Eye

Reboot Weekly: Making Data Usable, Navigating Policy Overload, and Reimagining Public Communication

This week on Reboot Democracy, John Wihbey and Jill Abramson draw on a year of workshops with 1,400 public-sector communicators to show how AI can accelerate research and storytelling, but in a context of declining trust, it raises the stakes. Stefaan Verhulst, PhD, and Adam Zable chart a “Fourth Wave” of open data where AI serves as an interface to authoritative data. Jorge Cesar Ramirez Mata demonstrates how #ReguLens helps organizations navigate policy overload and engage earlier in the policymaking process. Beyond Reboot, Janna Quitney Anderson and Lee Rainie warn that AI is becoming society’s invisible operating system and that resilience requires collective infrastructure. Jennifer Pahlka argues philanthropy should help governments build AI capacity and reduce vendor dependence. Research mapping eight European countries finds strong use of AI in agenda-setting but gaps in accountability. Nava Labs shows AI can improve benefits navigation accuracy, but only with sustained support. OpenAI’s blueprint proposes taxes on automated labor and public wealth mechanisms. A World Health Organization-backed effort calls for treating AI as a public mental health issue as risks grow.

Published on Apr 9, 2026 by Elana Banin and Dane Gambrell