News That Caught Our Eye #69
Published by Dane Gambrell and Angelique Casem on July 30, 2025
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.
In the news this week
- Governing AI:Setting the rules for a fast-moving technology.
- AI for Governance:Smarter public institutions through machine intelligence.
- AI and Public Engagement:Bolstering participation
- AI Infrastructure:Computing resources, data systems and energy use
- AI and International Relations:News that caught our eye
Upcoming Events
August 4, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Chatbots in Public Service: Responsible Design and Use Vance Ricks, Teaching Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science, Northeastern University
August 12, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Avoiding the Government Communication Trap Jamie Kimes, Founder, The Idea Garden, Terry Rubin, Co-founder and Owner, The Professional Communicators
August 20, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: From Bureaucracy to Vitality: Transforming Public Organizations Michele Zanini, Co-founder, Management Lab
August 21, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: UX in Government: How to Hire, Build Skills, and Grow Capacity Cindy Phan, UX Engagement Lead, U.S. Digital Response, Keith Wilson, Talent Engagement Manager, US Digital Response
August 26, 2025, 2:00 PM ET: Future-Ready Government: Building Resilience Across State and Public Agencies Dan Chenok, Executive Director, IBM Center for The Business of Government
AI for Law Enforcement: Beginning on September 4, 2025, this workshop series for law enforcement and public safety professionals builds foundational knowledge and best practices for responsible AI deployment in policing.
Reboot Democracy: Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era: Starting on September 11, 2025, learn how to design effective and efficient AI-enhanced citizen engagement that translates public input into meaningful outcomes. This series is hosted and curated by Beth Simone Noveck, founder of InnovateUS and the GovLab and Danielle Allen, Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation.
Amplify: Mastering Public Communication in the AI Age: Beginning on October 7, 2025, this workshop series explores how AI tools—when used responsibly and transparently—can strengthen communication, broaden outreach, and counter disinformation. The series is hosted and curated by former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson and John Wihbey, Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) at Northeastern University and an associate professor of media innovation and technology,, alongside Henry Griggs.
Governing AI
Governing AI
AI Safety Index
“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.”
Read articleGoverning AI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is right and very wrong about AI-faked voices
“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.”
Read articleGoverning AI
What you may have missed about Trump’s AI Action Plan
“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.”
Read articleAI for Governance
AI for Governance
AI and Government Workers: Use Cases in Public Administration
“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.”
Read articleAI for Governance
Public Encounters and Government Chatbots: When Servers Talk to Citizens
“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.”
Read articleAI for Governance
DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations
“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.”
Read articleAI and Public Engagement
AI and Public Engagement
How AI Can Unlock Public Wisdom and Revitalize Democratic Governance
“...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.”
Read articleAI and Public Engagement
Governments Want to Ease AI Regulation for Innovation, But Do Citizens Agree?
“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.”
Read articleAI Infrastructure
AI Infrastructure
Sovereignty, Security, Scale: A UK Strategy for AI Infrastructure
“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.”
Read articleAI and International Relations
AI and International Relations
China releases AI action plan days after the U.S. as global tech race heats up
“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.”
Read articleA Project Of
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