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 ...

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 pip...

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, st...

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 in...

A mayor presents a plan, residents push back, and everyone leaves frustrated, not because people weren’t heard, but because listening and engagement happened at the wrong moment. This piece reframes p...

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...

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 oversim...

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 f...

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 v...

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...

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 Im...

AI agents are reshaping how systems operate across sectors. This piece argues that the imminent challenge to address is autonomy, including how agents act, interact, and scale in open environments. It...

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...

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 ...

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 r...

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 piec...

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 sug...

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 ne...

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 A...

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 ...

In this conversation with Elana Banin, Lorelei Kelly argues that rebuilding democratic resilience requires redesigning the institutional infrastructure connecting citizens to Congress. Drawing on cons...

Boston is preparing for a future where AI agents increasingly interact with government systems. In this interview, Boston's Chief Information Officer Santiago Garces explains how the city is experimen...

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 coll...

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...

A new paper urges universities to resist the uncritical adoption of AI, arguing that existing research integrity standards already prohibit much of what institutions are normalizing. Beth Simone Novec...

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 acce...

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

A new paper introducing the UbuntuGuard benchmark questions whether strong results on English-language safety tests consistently translate into responsible use. Built from policies developed by 155 Af...

Max Stier argues that rebuilding trust in government begins inside agencies by recognizing and elevating the everyday excellence of career civil servants. Drawing on the Partnership for Public Service...

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 publish...

As the AIEP project concludes its first pilot in San Francisco, it offers more than a new AI tool for navigating IEPs. It shows what becomes possible when families, educators, designers, and researche...

Leaders increasingly believe public engagement matters, but lack the practical know-how to do it well. Beth Simone Noveck and Dane Gambrell examine how institutions use AI and collective intelligence ...

What if the problem with government wasn’t too many rules, but how they’re organized? Boston’s permitting overhaul with AI for Impact shows how AI and collective intelligence can simplify the user exp...

Families are expected to advocate for their children using IEP documents that are dense, technical, and often inaccessible. Instead of treating AI as a black box that produces generic summaries, this ...

Governments are adopting powerful new technologies faster than their systems are built to learn. This piece by Cassandra Madison at the Center for Civic Futures argues that responsible innovation requ...

Mapping schools in Uzbekistan and Bhutan revealed how data that appeared complete on paper often missed what mattered on the ground, like distance, access, and everyday conditions. By treating geograp...

A hiring tool changes your "personality" score based on whether there's a bookshelf behind you in an interview. A hospital model suggests asthmatics are safer—because it learned how to respond to the ...

We’re launching the Observatory of Public Sector AI, a new research initiative of InnovateUS and The GovLab that draws on data from more than 150,000 public servants nationwide. By analyzing how publi...

Reeve Bull shows how Virginia is using AI to improve regulatory review, from analyzing statutes to streamlining outdated rules. Anirudh Dinesh looks to India, where the Bhashini platform expands democ

India's Bhashini platform is democratizing access to digital services for 1.4 billion people by treating multilingual capability as public infrastructure. Through crowdsourced voice donations and open...

This piece examines how the Commonwealth of Virginia is using artificial intelligence to modernize regulatory review, shifting the focus from regulating AI to governing with it. Drawing on recent refo...

U.S. labor law is shaped by thousands of decisions issued each year by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the courts, yet much of this precedent remains difficult for workers, organizers, a...

New Jersey’s Office of Innovation has received a Public Benefit Innovation Fund grant to expand its AI platform with tools that help residents access benefits faster and with fewer errors. In this con...

Conventional wisdom presents mid-sized economies with two options for accessing advanced AI: rely on American or Chinese systems, or fall behind. Neither choice preserves the technological sovereignty...