News That Caught Our Eye #61

Published on June 5, 2025

Summary

In the news this week: The GovLab wants your feedback on our new "Civic and Democratic AI" course which teaches people how to use AI to organize for community action. A Berlin Global Gov Tech Center whitepaper – "The Agentic State" – lays out an ambitious vision for how AI agents can reshape the core functions of government, while an AI Now report identifies strategies for how community organizers, policymakers, and the public can shape AI’s development and use. While Anthropic’s CEO warns that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, data from the Global AI Jobs Barometer shows that AI is making humans more valuable, not less. Contractors who work on Google’s AI products continue their campaign to organize a union, while a report finds that tech firms are exploiting workers in the Global South to develop AI models. Read more in this week’s AI News That Caught Our Eye.

Upcoming InnovateUS Workshops

InnovateUS delivers no-cost, at-your-own-pace, and live learning on data, digital, innovation, and AI skills. Designed for civic and public sector, programs are free and open to all.

June 5, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Community Engagement for Public Professionals: Overview Deborah Stine, Founder and Chief Instructor, Science and Technology Policy Academy
June 10, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Generative AI for Public Sector Communicators: Tools, Ethics, and Best Practices John Wihbey, Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) & Associate Professor, Northeastern University
June 12, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Community Engagement for Public Professionals: Interviews Deborah Stine, Founder and Chief Instructor, Science and Technology Policy Academy
June 17, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Community Engagement for Public Professionals: Focus Groups Deborah Stine, Founder and Chief Instructor, Science and Technology Policy Academy
June 18, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Leading Through Reform: Strategies to Engage Complex Teams Malena Brookshire, Executive Steering Committee member, NextWave Federal Finance Leadership Program

For more workshops visit https://innovate-us.org/workshops

Special Announcements

AI for Governance

FDA Launches Agency-Wide AI Tool to Optimize Performance for the American People

News Staff on June 2, 2025 in FDA

“The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today launched Elsa, a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool designed to help employees—from scientific reviewers to investigators—work more efficiently… Elsa offers a secure platform for FDA employees to access internal documents while ensuring all information remains within the agency…The agency is already using Elsa to accelerate clinical protocol reviews, shorten the time needed for scientific evaluations, and identify high-priority inspection targets.”

Read article

AI for Governance

Research Radar: The Agentic State: A 20-Year Wish List, Finally Within Reach?

Beth Simone Noveck on June 3, 2025 in Reboot Democracy

“This week’s Research Radar highlights The Agentic State, an ambitious whitepaper arguing that AI agents could reshape the core functions of government. It’s a timely vision for public sector transformation —worth reading, debating, and building on….AI agents are fundamentally different from previous technologies—and crucially, different from the large language models dominating current AI discussions. Unlike large language models that generate text, AI agents can perceive, reason, and act with limited human input. They don’t just inform decisions; they make them. And this whitepaper does a valuable job of showing how those capabilities could transform governance—if we can figure out how to implement them.”

Read article

AI for Governance

White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say

Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert on May 29, 2025 in The Washington Post

“‘The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,’ which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science...Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping ‘MAHA Report’ appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies... Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all…”

Read article

AI for Governance

Using AI to Reform Government is Much Harder Than it Looks

Ben Green on June 3, 2025 in Tech Policy Press

“Last week, Elon Musk announced his official departure from the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But despite the list of supposed accomplishments…his tenure in government fell far short of expectations. He originally boasted that, aided by AI, it would be possible to cut a trillion dollars of government spending. Now, after reaching just a fraction of that goal (and possibly even increasing long-term budget deficits), Musk appears chastened…his experience highlights a broader lesson that transcends DOGE: using AI to reform government is much harder than policymakers and technologists assume.”

Read article

AI and Labor

The Human Workforce Behind AI Wants a Union

Emmet Fraizer on May 28, 2025 in The Nation

“[AI data rater Ricardo] Levario was one of the most prominent of those organizers—until this February, when he was fired amid mounting conflicts over the union campaign. While he and others have filed complaints with the NLRB, they have little legal recourse given Trump’s incapacitation of the agency. Still, they haven’t given up: In April, GlobalLogic employees released a demand letter calling for better pay parity and job security…As mass layoffs accumulate, tech companies have enjoyed ever-greater power to crack down on worker actions—internal criticism, petitions, talking to journalists—that they may once have tolerated. Meanwhile, their contractors have never enjoyed anything resembling job security.”

Read article

AI and Labor

Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen on May 28, 2025 in Axios

“Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world's most powerful creators of artificial intelligence — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us: AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office. Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop "sugar-coating" what's coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs….Amodei, 42, who's building the very technology he predicts could reorder society overnight, said he's speaking out in hopes of jarring government and fellow AI companies into preparing — and protecting — the nation.”

Read article

Governing AI

Artificial Power: 2025 Landscape Report

Kate Brennan, Amba Kak, and Dr. Sarah Myers West on June 3, 2025 in AI Now

“Artificial Power, our 2025 Landscape Report, puts forward an actionable strategy for the public to reclaim agency over the future of AI. In the aftermath of the ‘AI boom,’ the report examines how the push to integrate AI products everywhere grants AI companies – and the tech oligarchs that run them – power that goes far beyond their deep pockets. We need to reckon with the ways in which today’s AI isn’t just being used by us, it’s being used on us. The report moves from diagnosis to action: offering concrete strategies for community organizers, policymakers, and the public to change this trajectory.”

Read article

AI and Problem Solving

Unlock Your City’s Hidden Solutions

Andreas Pawelke, Basma Albanna and Damiano Cerrone on May 5, 2025 in Medium

"Data-Powered Positive Deviance" (DPPD) is a new approach to solving city problems that focuses on what's already working instead of what's broken. Cities use data analysis and AI to identify neighborhoods or communities that are succeeding despite facing similar challenges as struggling areas, then study these ‘bright spots’ to understand why they work.”

Read article

AI and Public Engagement

Engagement Integrity: Ensuring Legitimacy at a time of AI-Augmented Participation

Stefaan G. Verhulst on May 21, 2025 in Medium

“As participatory practices are increasingly tech-enabled, ensuring engagement integrity is becoming more urgent. Electoral integrity, particularly in the digital context, has already been compromised through tactics like coordinated inauthentic behavior…, deepfakes …, and micro-targeted manipulation …. Biases embedded in AI agents — whether through training data, model architecture, or interaction design — can subtly shape the framing of issues, the prioritization of topics, or the weighting of arguments. Moreover, without transparent guardrails, AI-driven deliberative tools could be co-opted by actors with vested interests, skewing outcomes under the veneer of neutral facilitation.”

Read article

AI and Public Engagement

Civic and Democratic AI: A New Course for Community Action

Beth Simone Noveck on June 2, 2025 in Reboot Democracy

“We are developing ‘Civic and Democratic AI’, an 8-part WhatsApp course that teaches people how to use generative AI to navigate government processes, understand complex documents, and organize for community action. The course aims to provide practical AI skills for civic engagement. We are seeking feedback on the course content. Share your insights and expertise as we roll out this free program to help communities use AI to understand their government, access their rights, and organize for change.”

Read article

AI and Public Engagement

Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Taxonomy for Navigating the Global Landscape of AI Regulation

Sacha Alanoca, Shira Gur-Arieh, Tom Zick, and Kevin Klyman on May 19, 2025 in ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

“AI governance has transitioned from soft law—such as national AI strategies and voluntary guidelines—to binding regulation at an unprecedented pace. This evolution has produced a complex legislative landscape: blurred definitions of ‘AI regulation’ mislead the public and create a false sense of safety; divergent regulatory frameworks risk fragmenting international cooperation; and uneven access to key information heightens the danger of regulatory capture. Clarifying the scope and substance of AI regulation is vital to uphold democratic rights and align international AI efforts. We present a taxonomy to map the global landscape of AI regulation. Our framework targets essential metrics—technology or application-focused rules, horizontal or sectoral regulatory coverage, ex ante or ex post interventions, maturity of the digital legal landscape, enforcement mechanisms, and level of stakeholder participation—to classify the breadth and depth of AI regulation. ”

Read article

▲