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Ahead of a timely conversation around the civic role of the university in an age of democratic uncertainty and rapid technological change, Beth Simone Noveck spoke to the Scotsman about how Scotland's...

The 2026 CAIDP AI Index, ranking AI policy commitments across 90 countries, shows that while most governments now agree on core governance principles, the real divide lies in implementation. Many are advancing laws, oversight, and public participation, but progress lags in turning commitments into practice. As the baseline shifts from whether to govern AI to how, the report underscores that outcomes depend less on frameworks and more on the capacity of public institutions—and the civil servants within them—to operationalize these principles in everyday decisions.

A new WHO discussion paper explores how AI can accelerate research synthesis and keep evidence continuously up to date. Elana Banin welcomes the push to use AI to strengthen the evidence-to-policy pipeline, but argues the more consequential question is whether AI will redefine what counts as evidence in the first place. The harder constraint will ultimately be institutional, as most health workers lack the training and infrastructure to adopt these tools. Government decision-makers must start building the processes to test AI outputs against frontline knowledge and the capacity to make that adoption defensible.

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.

As the Basque Government moves to pass a new Transparency Law this May, it is redefining what transparency means. No longer just about access to information, the law embeds collaborative governance into its core, requiring that decision-making processes be open, traceable, and shaped with others. This piece explores what it looks like to turn participation from a principle into a legal obligation, and what it takes to make participation a structured, accountable part of how policy is made.

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.

Using AI to analyze over 2,400 employee comments, California’s Engaged California team found that the challenge wasn’t the scale of the data, but making sense of complex, layered input without oversimplifying it. Their experience shows why human judgment remains essential, from building taxonomies to catching errors, as results can shift significantly depending on how AI is applied and what people choose to trust and prioritize.

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.

This week, Power & Politics takes a deeper look at Artificial Intelligence in government, specifically an enhanced initiative in New York State implementing AI

A show of hands inside Elon University’s LaRose Digital Theatre on April 15 revealed a clear mood — more students felt concerned about artificial intelligence than excited. That tension framed a campus conversation as Northeastern University professor of law, engineering, policy, communications and computer science Beth Noveck challenged students to rethink AI not just as a threat but as a potential tool to strengthen democracy.

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.

In “Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the AI Age,” based on insights from 386 global experts, a warning emerges: the greatest risk is not a single catastrophic event, but a slow drift toward diminished human agency, fragmented reality, and growing dependence on automated systems. Lee Raine and Janna Anderson reflect on how, as AI becomes society’s invisible operating system, individual resilience is no longer enough. The report argues for urgent, coordinated action to build resilience as shared infrastructure across governments, institutions, and communities to ensure people can still question, contest, and shape the systems increasingly shaping them.

Making the government more people-centered starts with leaders. Amira Boland explains her experience.

Designing a one-hour course on democratic engagement and AI means confronting genuinely hard questions about representativeness, political framing, and audience, where thoughtful experts disagree, and every choice involves a real tradeoff. Over the past week, we drafted, debated, and cut more than 25,000 words to a working script, informed by over 300 comments from 50 advisors across 24 countries and a room full of democratic theorists in Barcelona. This post explains the three hardest calls we had to make and why we made them.

Alister Martin, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, talks about his background and what he plans to prioritize in his new job.

Millions of Americans miss out on health and food assistance benefits due to fragmented systems and complex enrollment processes. This piece explores how Link Health, in partnership with the AI for Impact program, is combining AI tools with human navigators to rethink how public benefits are delivered in healthcare settings. It argues that the next frontier is better evidence. States should fund research to compare enrollment approaches, portal design, and navigator support to determine which improve health outcomes and guide smarter public investment.

Growing up in Kakuma refugee camp, Nhial Deng experienced what it means to be excluded from opportunities. Returning years later, he saw young people using AI not as aid, but as a tool to build skills, income, and futures in real time. This piece argues that AI is already functioning as an economic opportunity layer, but one that remains uneven and fragile without intentional design. Drawing on examples from Canada, Singapore, and Kenya, Deng outlines how governments can move from accidental access to structured opportunity by connecting AI to jobs, embedding it in trusted institutions, and building safeguards alongside deployment.

Massachusetts municipalities are eligible for an estimated $17.5 billion in federal funding, but accessing it is often harder than securing it. In partnership with the Massachusetts Federal Funds and Infrastructure Office, the Burnes Center for Social Change is launching GrantWell, an AI-powered tool designed to reduce the friction that keeps many communities from applying. Anjith Prakash, lead engineer at GrantWell, explains how the tool helps users find opportunities, understand requirements, and move local needs into competitive applications, expanding access to funding.

In this post, Eileen Twiggs draws on lessons from the InnovateUS workshop "Effective Use of Social Media: Storytelling, Trust, and Institutional Brand" to explore how public servants can move beyond risk-averse messaging to tell more human, compelling stories. From finding the “true thing” in everyday work to using AI as a thoughtful teammate, these practical strategies show how to communicate more effectively in today’s fast-moving information environment and rebuild trust one story at a time.

Dr. Sara Bazoobandi examines how Iran’s doctrine of “knowledge jihad” shaped the development of its digital and AI infrastructure, transforming technology into an instrument of state control. The piece traces how this system, built for surveillance and centralized authority, has also created strategic fragility, offering a cautionary lesson for democracies designing the foundations of AI governance.

More than 50 practitioners, researchers, and civic technologists from 24 countries reviewed the draft curriculum for Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era, providing over 300 comments and suggestions. The feedback, relayed by Dane Gambrell and Sarah Hubbard, highlighted the need for clearer guidance on institutional readiness, trust, inclusion, and the risks and limits of AI in public participation. This post summarizes the key themes that emerged, explains how AI tools were used to synthesize the feedback, and outlines the next steps in developing the course.

Cities often treat nearby universities as occasional partners rather than strategic collaborators. But as artificial intelligence reshapes local economies and public services, that relationship may need to change. Drawing on a new policy brief, The AI Lab Next Door, Neil Kleiman argues that city–university “compacts” can transform transactional ties into intentional partnerships, helping communities harness the growing AI capacity already taking shape on college campuses.

InnovateUS and the Center for Civic Futures are launching a new series exploring how AI can help human services agencies reduce administrative burden and improve benefits delivery. Drawing on Robert Asaro-Angelo’s experience as Commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development, this post examines how agencies can use AI to help the public sector improve benefits delivery, reduce administrative burden, and better support both frontline staff and the people they serve.

Why universities are valuable AI partners for local governments, and how to build and leverage those relationships.

In this commentary, originally published by InDaily South Australia, Matt Ryan argues that artificial intelligence can help governments deliver more effective, human-centered services, but only if it builds public trust and democratic legitimacy. Drawing on examples from Spain, San Francisco, and the UK, he outlines a path for South Australia to develop “sovereign AI capability.” His proposal focuses on three priorities: participatory AI governance, stronger public-sector AI skills, and reinvesting efficiency gains into public services, ensuring AI improves government while strengthening democracy.

In this conversation with Elana Banin, Lorelei Kelly argues that rebuilding democratic resilience requires redesigning the institutional infrastructure connecting citizens to Congress. Drawing on constitutional history and emerging technologies, she explores how deliberative technology and AI could help revive the First Amendment’s promises of assembly and petition for the digital age.

Artificial intelligence is often portrayed as a force that will destroy jobs. In this essay, Seth Harris argues that it can also expand opportunity. By using AI to identify and remove unnecessary college degree requirements in state hiring, governments can reduce barriers to public employment, address racial and class disparities, and fill critical roles more efficiently. Backed by new research underway from the Burnes Center for Social Change, supported by the GitLab Foundation, he outlines how thoughtfully deployed AI can break down barriers and accelerate the shift to skills-based hiring.

The current controversy over the Pentagon’s AI contracts reveals a deeper issue: governments are shaping the AI market through procurement in the wrong ways or not at all, failing to make demands that AI strengthen democracy and improve governance. As AI becomes core public infrastructure, public institutions must use their purchasing power deliberately by requiring portability, accountability, and interoperability and prioritizing use in the public interest. This post explains the public conversation we are having about public and democratic AI andhow governments can buy, build, and govern AI on the public’s terms.

As governments move from AI pilots to workforce-wide access, the hardest questions are practical: What does it cost at scale? Who gets access? How do you log usage and manage risk? How do we pair access with training so it’s safe — and actually useful?Drawing on lessons from New Jersey and Boston, this post outlines how to structure AI deployment using usage-based pricing, cloud infrastructure you control, and training designed to drive real impact.

This week on Reboot Democracy, Max Stier explores how AI can strengthen internal government culture by building real-time recognition systems for civil servants. Elana Banin examines the UbuntuGuard b

In Argentina, the Red de Innovación Local (RIL) experimented with its AI-powered platform, PortalRIL, to shift from fragmented work plans to an inquiry-driven planning process anchored in a “Question Tree.” By surfacing patterns, trade-offs, and synergies across teams, AI helped compress months of coordination into weeks of shared clarity. The result suggests that AI’s real promise is to expand strategic horizons and accelerate collective insight, freeing public servants to focus on judgment, identity, and long-term public value.

RebootDemocracy.AI - We believe that artificial intelligence can and should be harnessed to strengthen participatory democracy.

Artificial intelligence will increase demand for government services before it increases efficiency.

Artificial intelligence will increase demand for government services before it increases efficiency.

As Korea aims to become a top-three global AI power, the government has staked its strategy on “sovereign AI” as both an economic and national security priority. In this reflection, originally published in the Herald Insight Collection, Merve Hickok examines Korea’s multibillion-dollar investment in a national foundation model amid U.S.–China competition and the rise of Open-Source AI, asking whether alternative investments—such as small language models, compute and energy efficiency, and AI governance and evaluation—might better secure Korea’s long-term autonomy and global leadership.