New Commons is a six-month, Indigenous-led incubator that helps teams design a fundable data commons for their languages and cultures.

New Commons is a six-month, Indigenous-led incubator that helps teams design a fundable data commons for their languages and cultures.

New Commons is a six-month, Indigenous-led incubator that helps teams design a fundable data commons for their languages and cultures.

New Commons is a six-month, Indigenous-led incubator that helps teams design a fundable data commons for their languages and cultures.

New Commons is a six-month, Indigenous-led incubator that helps teams design a fundable data commons for their languages and cultures.

A six-month capacity-building program that supports Indigenous-led teams in developing a fundable data commons proposal

New Commons is a six-month, Indigenous-led incubator that helps teams design a fundable data commons for their languages and cultures.

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.

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.

The GovLab, Brooklyn Public Library, and Alliance for Public Interest Technology at New York University will be hosting a special “Questions Lab” as part of New York City Open Data Week 2026.

The GovLab, Brooklyn Public Library, and Alliance for Public Interest Technology at New York University will be hosting a special “Questions Lab” as part of New York City Open Data Week 2026.

This landscaping review presents findings and recommendations on the ways social data can advance research on life, health and wellbeing across public health, humanities and social sciences.

While the West races toward artificial general intelligence, Vietnam is charting a different path with “Applied AI,” using tools like ChatGPT to overcome language barriers, limited budgets, and…

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…

New America’s Anne-Marie Slaughter says states are becoming the laboratories of democratic AI—building “public AI” that is open, trustworthy, and rooted in the public good. This week’s stories bring t

States aren’t merely engaged in how America adapts artificial intelligence; they are key to determining how the U.S. can thrive with the technology. This summer, Princeton University’s Center for…

Governor Hochul announced an AI training pilot program designed for the NYS workforce.

This week’s reporting captures a widening gap between AI adoption and the structures meant to guide it, from multilateral arenas to frontline agencies. The World Bank outlines readiness tools for publ

AI’s biggest breakthroughs were built on public datasets; the next wave should be, too. If governments make data AI-ready and keep access open, we can power tools that explain laws, improve services,…

Co-designed with parents, the AIEP tool is both a technical solution and a catalyst for civic power for families of children with diverse abilities. By building AI literacy through in-person training…

Congress will roll out Microsoft Copilot for 6,000 House staffers. Ohio launches an AI-powered public safety app while Albania’s AI “minister” echoes a South Korean experiment. A Supreme Court ruling

Choosing a digital participation platform is a governance choice. Dane Gambrell's latest post explores what the new Guide to Digital Participation Platforms gets right, the idea that participation…

The Washington Post dismisses Albania’s chatbot minister as a gimmick. Yet Seoul proved 25 years ago that well-designed digital systems can curb corruption by limiting discretion and increasing…