News That Caught Our Eye #69

Published on July 30, 2025

Summary

China releases its AI action plan calling for more global cooperation to support governance and use of the technology. A Roosevelt Institute report examines how governments’ adoption of AI impacts public administrators. A new AI Safety Index highlights critical gaps in risk management and safety planning among the leading AI developers. Carnegie Endowment research shows how AI can enhance democratic governance through improved public engagement. While the White House moves forward with further deregulating the AI industry, a survey shows that Americans – and people worldwide – support robust guardrails to guide AI development. Meanwhile, DOGE develops an AI tool aimed at eliminating 50% of federal regulations within Trump's first year. Read more in this week’s AI News That Caught Our Eye.

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Governing AI

AI Safety Index

Future of Life Institute Team on July 17, 2025 in Future of Life Institute

“The Future of Life Institute's AI Safety Index provides an independent assessment of seven leading AI companies' efforts to manage both immediate harms and catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems. Conducted with an expert review panel of distinguished AI researchers and governance specialists, this second evaluation reveals an industry struggling to keep pace with its own rapid capability advances—with critical gaps in risk management and safety planning that threaten our ability to control increasingly powerful AI systems.”

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Governing AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is right and very wrong about AI-faked voices

Shira Ovide on July 25, 2025 in The Washington Post

“Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, said this week that he’s worried about artificial intelligence-generated audio empowering crooks to steal your money and commit other fraud…He missed an opportunity, however, to stress AI companies’ responsibility in combating fraud that his industry helped create… You need corporations and governments to step in because you cannot protect yourself from cheap, easy-to-create AI voice impostors. How effectively companies and officials manage impostor fraud and other clear AI risks is a crucial test of whether technology can serve our best interests.”

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Governing AI

What you may have missed about Trump’s AI Action Plan

James O’Donnell on July 29, 2025 in MIT Technology Review

“A number of the executive orders and announcements coming from the White House since Donald Trump returned to office have painted an ambitious vision for America’s AI future—crushing competition with China, abolishing ‘woke’ AI models that suppress conservative speech, jump-starting power-hungry AI data centers. But the details have been sparse. The White House’s AI Action Plan, released last week, is meant to fix that. Many of the points in the plan won’t come as a surprise, and you’ve probably heard of the big ones by now…But if you dig deeper, certain parts of the plan that didn’t pop up in any headlines reveal more about where the administration’s AI plans are headed.”

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AI for Governance

AI and Government Workers: Use Cases in Public Administration

Samantha Shorey on July 15, 2025 in Roosevelt Institute

“This report scans the landscape of AI use in the public sector at the state and local level, evaluating its benefits and harms through the examples of chatbots and automated tools that transcribe audio, summarize policies, and determine eligibility for benefits. These examples reveal how AI can make the experience of work more stressful, devalue workers’ skills, increase individual responsibility, and decrease decision-making quality. Public sector jobs have been an important source of security for middle-class Americans, especially women of color and Indigenous women, for decades. Without an understanding of what is at stake for government workers, what they need to effectively accomplish their tasks, and how hard they already work to provide crucial citizen services, the deployment of AI technologies—sold as a solution in the public sector—will simply create new problems.”

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AI for Governance

Public Encounters and Government Chatbots: When Servers Talk to Citizens

Art Alishani, Vincent Homburg, Ott Velsberg on July 4, 2025 in Public Administration Review

“Public service providers around the world are now offering chatbots to answer citizens' questions and deliver digital services. Using these artificial intelligence-powered technologies, citizens can engage in conversations with governments through systems that mimic face-to-face interactions and adjust their use of natural language to citizens' communication styles. This paper examines emerging experiences with chatbots in government interactions, with a focus on exploring what public administration practitioners and scholars should expect from chatbots in public encounters. Furthermore, it seeks to identify what gaps exist in the general understanding of digital public encounters.”

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AI for Governance

DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations

Hannah Natanson et al. on July 26, 2025 in The Washington Post

“The U.S. DOGE Service is using a new artificial intelligence tool to slash federal regulations, with the goal of eliminating half of Washington’s regulatory mandates by the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and four government officials familiar with the plans. The tool, called the ‘DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,’ is supposed to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations to determine which can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law…The proposed use of AI to accomplish swift, massive deregulation expands upon the Trump administration’s work to embed AI across the government — using it for everything from fighting wars to reviewing taxes. And it dovetails with the administration’s aim to unwind regulations government-wide, even without AI. But it’s unclear whether a new, untested technology could make mistakes in its attempts to analyze federal regulations typically put in place for a reason.”

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AI and Public Engagement

How AI Can Unlock Public Wisdom and Revitalize Democratic Governance

Rahmin Sarabi on July 22, 2025 in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

“...Artificial intelligence—specifically large language models (LLMs)—is beginning to serve as a transformative tool for public engagement and policymaking, led by innovative governments and civic institutions. When used thoughtfully, LLMs can help unlock public wisdom, rebuild trust, and enable better decisionmaking—not by replacing human judgment, but by strengthening it... By strengthening these foundations, AI can enable the collaborative problem-solving today’s interconnected problems demand and help us renew democracy to meet the challenges of our time. This piece examines concrete applications where LLM-based AI is already enhancing democratic processes—from citizen engagement to survey and context analysis—and explores principles for scaling these innovations responsibly.”

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AI and Public Engagement

Governments Want to Ease AI Regulation for Innovation, But Do Citizens Agree?

Natali Helberger et al. on July 28, 2025 in Tech Policy Press

“Conspicuously absent in the debate about [AI] regulation vs innovation are citizens. Again, the European AI Continent Strategy is instructive. Where citizens are mentioned (six times in total), this refers to the need to educate and upskill citizens to utilize AI effectively. After all, without users, the ambitious goals to enhance productivity and competitiveness or provide high-quality public services would remain rather theoretical. This raises an important question: Do citizens want regulation, and what do they expect from their governments? So, we asked them.”

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AI Infrastructure

Sovereignty, Security, Scale: A UK Strategy for AI Infrastructure

Keegan McBride et al. on July 29, 2025 in Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

“Britain’s role in the emerging AI era is not yet determined, but the choices the government makes today will shape its ultimate trajectory. The United Kingdom must choose whether to take AI infrastructure seriously, or to continue its current trajectory of being the ‘largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own AI infrastructure’...This is a now-or-never moment. Creating the right environment for AI-infrastructure investment will drive innovation and support both the government’s current growth agenda and the UK’s ambitions to transform into an AI-enabled state. Failing to meet this moment will have significant detrimental impacts on the country’s economy and security in the long term. If Britain waits until demand is high, it will be too late and AI will become yet another area where national ambition outpaces the physical systems needed to realise it.”

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AI and International Relations

China releases AI action plan days after the U.S. as global tech race heats up

Evelyn Cheng on July 26, 2025 in CNBC

“China on Saturday released a global action plan for artificial intelligence, calling for international cooperation on tech development and regulation… Days earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump announced an American action plan for AI that included calls to reduce alleged ‘woke’ bias in AI models and support the deployment of U.S. tech overseas… In his speech, Premier Li emphasized China’s ‘AI plus’ plan for integrating the tech across industries and said the country was willing to help other nations with the technology, especially in the Global South.”

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