Entries Tagged "democracy"

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Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan

Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?”

We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the concentration of power, wealth and control among tech oligarchs.

And yet we reached a vastly different conclusion than Sanders on what to do about it.

The senator points to a once radical but increasingly popular solution: creating a US sovereign wealth fund by taking 50% stock in AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI. The argument in favor of this is twofold. One: it would establish democratic control over the AI companies, giving the government “the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them”. Two: it would return a big chunk of the economic rewards of soaring AI valuations to the public, ensuring “trillions of dollars potentially generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us”.

We laud both these goals unreservedly.

We wholeheartedly agree that there must be public influence over the development and use of AI, just as we demand the government intervene to ensure that automakers, drugmakers, airlines and other industries balance profitability with public safety and the public interest. And we credit the senator with recognizing that there are more levers for the government to pull beyond the promulgation of regulation to achieve this.

And we also agree that the obscene, dangerous accumulation of wealth among AI companies needs to be disrupted. As OpenAI and Anthropic race to be minted as the world’s latest trillion-dollar AI companies, we should recognize that—whether or not it constitutes a bubble—these staggering market capitalizations represent a transfer of wealth. The flow of money goes from the smaller businesses and actual people using AI, and being subjected to it, to the owners of these tech companies.

That includes the world’s 86 AI billionaires “seeking to maximize their power and profit” aiming to decide the “fate of humanity … behind closed doors in Silicon Valley”, as Sanders said.

And yet, while we do not outright oppose the taking of AI company stock, or of a US sovereign wealth fund, there are better ways to achieve Sanders’ stated goals.

Public ownership of these companies entangles corporate profit and valuation with the public interest. It would incentivize the government to clear regulations, permit the exploitation of workers and users, suppress competition, encourage AI adoption regardless of the responsibleness of the implementation or appropriateness of the use case, and otherwise act on behalf of corporate interests.

After all, if growing, say, Nvidia from its first $5tn in value to its next $5tn also represents a doubling in value of this segment of the sovereign wealth fund, then you can expect the fund managers to support chip sales, foreign and domestic, with the same zeal as the company’s private investors.

This is not an effective way to influence corporations to act in the public interest. In fact, it makes corporate influence on the government more likely.

We should be wary of this possibility because we’ve seen it before. Ownership of substantial stakes in oil companies by the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, does not seem to have steered those corporations to pro-environmental policies. Instead, the Norwegian government’s dependence on those companies has inhibited them from taking climate action. Here in the US, public employee pension funds merit the same criticism: the fiduciary duty to generate wealth overwhelms any intention to direct their corporate holdings in the public interest.

A better answer is to separate the two goals. The standard way to share private rewards with the broader society that made them possible is taxation. Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed an excise tax on datacenters’ energy use. Others have proposed an AI token tax, which has much the same effect.

As to the goal of reshaping AI in the public interest, we have proposed an AI Public Option. The concept is for governments, be it federal or state, to establish publicly developed and operated AI models run by public institutions under democratic control. The idea is not to eliminate corporate AI or to seize it as a public asset, but rather for government to provide a competitive baseline that private AI offerings must meet or exceed to win business—just like the notion of a healthcare public option.

The Swiss have trailblazed this approach. Apertus is a large language model built by Swiss public servants, researchers at Swiss universities, using appropriately licensed training data and pre-existing Swiss public supercomputing infrastructure powered by renewable energy.

While Apertus doesn’t seriously compete with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models on performance benchmarks, it blows them out of the water in transparency, sustainability and compliance with EU regulations including adherence to copyright. It’s a nascent project, but suggestive of how public institutions can apply competitive pressure for corporate actors to behave responsibly.

Don’t confuse public AI with “sovereign AI“, the notion that every country needs to invest in domestic AI infrastructure. Sovereign AI is often invoked as a marketing scheme for big tech companies looking to sell to governments; it demands public investment without guaranteeing public control.

Sanders is a bold and savvy political operator. So why is he pursuing the sovereign wealth fund strategy when he must be aware of these risks? It may be due to another argument he makes in his op-ed: that the Trump administration and the billionaire owners of AI are aligned to the idea.

It’s expedient to capitalize on rare moments of seeming alignment across diverse political factions, but it also behooves us to ask why the AI billionaires are open to this extraordinary intervention. The answer, of course, is that they believe that for every dollar ceded to government stock expropriation, they will get back more in favorable government policies to protect that newfound investment.

Energy taxation is a straightforward way to make AI companies pay for the social disruption of their technologies. Public AI represents a non-monetary mechanism for governments to shape the development of AI, complementary to direct regulation of private actors, one with a far greater chance of influencing corporate behavior towards the public interest. We urge Sanders and other political leaders to consider them.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

Posted on June 12, 2026 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

Chilling Effects

Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it.

Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent.

This silence comes in the wake of a relentless Trump administration war on campus speech that has involved lawsuits, arrests, deportations and expulsions.

Reports cite a range of complicated factors for the restraint, from apathy to technology-induced incapacity. But as public policy and law and social science experts, we believe students aren’t protesting for a very simple reason: They are afraid. They are self-censoring and disengaging from campaign activism to avoid punitive measures.

In law and social science, we call this impact a chilling effect—the behavioral tendency for people in face of a threat to self-censor and restrain their activities for self-protection.

It’s increasingly clear to us that these impacts are not incidental or ancillary to Trump administration policy. Rather, the chilling effects are the point. This is the closest thing to a consistent governing strategy in Trump’s second term.

The broader chill of Trump threats

Chilling effects can be subtle, but today they are everywhere. And it’s not just students who are chilled by Trump administration threats.

Professors are censoring themselves in lectures and rewriting syllabuses. Researchers are stripping grant applications of words that might attract federal scrutiny, or abandoning the topics entirely. Media outlets are modifying their news coverage to avoid Trump lawsuits or sanctions.

Law enforcement and regulatory agencies are refusing to investigate Trump-aligned actors inside or outside government, and major national law firms are declining cases challenging Trump administration policies.

Publishers are “stepping back” from LGBTQ+ books and other progressive subjects. Many in targeted immigrant communities are afraid to leave home to go to work or school.

In most cases, these people and institutions are not being specifically targeted or threatened by Trump. But they are afraid, and their fear is doing the administration’s work for it. They stay silent, avoid attention and confrontation, and look the other way. In other cases, they change their speech and behavior to accommodate or conform to the administration’s worldview.

Of course, there are counterexamples, such as the winter protests in Minneapolis in response to brutality by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the recent “No Kings” rallies. But even here, the broader but less visible trend—chilling effects—is evident.

For instance, in recent reporting on the latest No Kings rallies, many media outlets observed that students were noticeably missing, despite the Trump administration’s unpopularity among younger Americans.

A persistent strategy

We believe none of this is by accident.

In a new book, “Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age,” one of us—Jon Penney—explains how law, technology, and state and corporate power are weaponized to chill and repress, and the dangers this poses for the United States and other democratic societies. The other—Bruce Schneier—has extensively studied the security infrastructure enabling this.

What we see isn’t gratuitous government cruelty, chaos or vengeance. Instead, we see a persistent strategy to maximize fear and chilling effects in ways that are corrosive to freedom and democracy.

Research suggests that surveillance, personal threats, uncertainty and abuse of power are key factors in doing so. The federal government has a clear and systematic pattern of employing these very mechanisms across a number of domains far beyond campuses.

They are evident in militarized raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and in journalists being arrested and indicted for reporting on protests. They are made clear in the long list of political enemies the Trump administration has investigated or threatened, including the Federal Reserve chairman. And they can also be seen in the weaponization of technology, including ramping up surveillance to target critics and protestors.

Corrosive to freedom and democracy

History offers some guidance on impacts.

During the McCarthy era, overreaching laws, surveillance, and public and private sector reprisals ostensibly targeted alleged communists. But the real aim was often to suppress progressive journalists, trade unions and political opposition.

In the 1960s, these same tactics were reused by Southern states to chill the Civil Rights Movement. Historians have written about how the widespread fear and conformity of these periods reshaped American society in enduring ways, including the destruction of progressive political movements and both delaying and muting the Civil Rights Movement itself.

When such state threats are systematized, they can foment a broader climate of fear, self-censorship and conformity. In that climate, dissenting speech, political opposition, democratic mobilization and other checks on power become increasingly difficult, even dangerous. It is no surprise, for instance, that Trump critics regularly admit to self-censorship, fearing for their safety.

Chilling effects are thus not only repressive—causing self-censorship—but productive. They produce conforming and compliant speech and behavior, which can have longer-term social impacts. They not only undermine protected rights and suppress accountability but can promote social change—even without a popular mandate to do so.

This latter point is often missed. It explains Trump’s assaults on universities and cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center for the Arts and the Smithsonian. Often dismissed as peculiar Trump obsessions, they are fully consistent with Project 2025—the sweeping policy blueprint for Trump’s second term authored by a coalition of conservative groups and its call to target the “institutions of American civil society” and “wield federal power” to “reverse” decades of progressive cultural advancements.

In the near term, this means an increasingly weakened democratic society, with the government and its patrons enjoying freedom to pursue their objectives. Over the long term, this can mean a changed society as more conformist and compliant speech and culture become more widely accepted and entrenched.

Not inevitable

In our view, this future is not inevitable, just as the McCarthy era “Red Scare” and violent civil rights era repression were not. In both cases, fear and chilling effects were resisted in law and civil society, as they can be today.

But the central mechanisms—surveillance, uncertainty, personal threats and abuse of power—would need to be addressed. For instance, new legislation could ensure justice for lawless government actors and constrain surveillance. Courts can block abuses of federal power, including illegal arrests, detentions and mass citizen databases.

The media, lawyers and civil society can hold the government accountable. And students, teachers, universities and cultural institutions can resist the tendency to self-censor and conform.

The citizen mobilization in Minnesota and the No Kings rallies are examples of that. But to resist chilling effects and their dangers over the long term, this would have to be the norm, not the exception.

This essay was written with Jon Penney, and originally appeared in The Conversation.

Posted on May 29, 2026 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning Voters

In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI, while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years pushing for state regulation.

Trump’s actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate over how and where to let AI transform our lives.

In a May 2025 survey of likely voters nationwide, more than 70% favored state and federal regulators having a hand in AI policy. A December 2025 poll by Navigator Research found similar results, with a massive net +48% favorability for more AI regulation. Yet despite the overwhelming preference of both voters and his party’s elected leaders—Congress was essentially unanimous in defeating a previous state AI regulation moratorium—Trump has delivered on a key priority of the industry. The order explicitly challenges the will of voters across blue and red states, from California to South Dakota, scrambling political positions around the technology and setting up a new ideological battleground in the upcoming race for Congress.

There are a number of ways that candidates and parties may try to capitalize on this emerging wedge issue before the midterms.

In 2025, much of the popular debate around AI was cast in terms of humans versus machines. Advances in AI and the companies it is associated with, it is said, come at the expense of humans. A new model release with greater capabilities for writing, teaching, or coding means more people in those disciplines losing their jobs.

This is a humanist debate. Making us talk to an AI customer-support agent is an affront to our dignity. Using AI to help generate media sacrifices authenticity. AI chatbots that persuade and manipulate assault our liberty. There is philosophical merit to these arguments, and yet they seem to have limited political salience.

Populism versus institutionalism is a better way to frame this debate in the context of US politics. The MAGA movement is widely understood to be a realignment of American party politics to ally the Republican party with populism, and the Democratic party with defenders of traditional institutions of American government and their democratic norms.

This frame is shattered by Trump’s AI order, which unabashedly serves economic elites at the expense of populist consumer protections. It is part of an ongoing courting process between MAGA and big tech, where the Trump political project sacrifices the interests of consumers and its populist credentials as it cozies up to tech moguls.

We are starting to see populist resistance to this government/big tech alignment emerge on the local scale. People in Maryland, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and many other states are vigorously opposing AI datacenters in their communities, based on environmental and energy-affordability impacts. These centers of opposition are politically diverse; both progressives and Trump-supporting voters are turning out in force, influencing their local elected officials to resist datacenter development.

This opposition to the physical infrastructure of corporate AI is so far staying local, but it may yet translate into a national and politically aligned movement that could divide the MAGA coalition.

Any policy discussions about AI should include the individual harms associated with job loss, as employers seek to replace laborers with machines. It should also include the systemic economic risks associated with concentrated and supercharged AI investment, the democratic risks associated with the increased power in monopolistic and politically influential tech companies, and the degradation of civic functions like journalism and education by AI. In order for our free market to function in the public interest, the companies amassing wealth and profiting from AI must be forced to take ownership of, and internalize, these costs.

The political salience of AI will grow to meet the staggering scale of financial investment and societal impact it is already commanding. There is an opportunity for enterprising candidates, of either political party, to take the mantle of opposing AI-linked harms in the midterm elections.

Political solutions start with organizing, and broadening the base of political engagement around these issues beyond the locally salient topic of datacenters. Movement leaders and elected officials in states that have taken action on AI regulation should mobilize around the blatant industry capture, wealth extraction, and corporate favoritism reflected in the Trump executive order. AI is no longer just a policy issue for governments to discuss: it is a political issue that voters must decide on and demand accountability on.

Posted on March 26, 2026 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Team Mirai and Democracy

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.

In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.

Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an AI Interviewer walks them through the subject, answering their questions, interrogating their experience, even challenging their thinking.

Voters get immediate feedback on how their individual point of view matches—or doesn’t—a party’s platform, and they can see whether and how the party adopts their feedback. This isn’t like an opinion poll that politicians use for calculating short-term electoral tactics. It’s a deliberative reasoning process that scales, engaging voters in defining policy and helping candidates to listen deeply to their constituents.

This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand hours engaging with Mirai’s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party’s gamified volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer actions per day in the runup to last week’s election.

It’s how Team Mirai, which translates to ‘The Future Party,’ does politics. Its founder, Takahiro Anno, first ran for local office in 2024 as a 33 year old software engineer standing for Governor of Tokyo. He came in fifth out of 56 candidates, winning more than 150,000 votes as an unaffiliated political outsider. He won attention by taking a distinctive stance on the role of technology in democracy and using AI aggressively in voter engagement.

Last year, Anno ran again, this time for the Upper Chamber of the national legislature—the Diet—and won. Now the head of a new national party, Anno found himself with a platform for making his vision of a new way of doing politics a reality.

In this recent House of Representatives election, Team Mirai shot up to win nearly four million votes. In the lower chamber’s proportional representation system, that was good enough for eleven total seats—the party’s first ever representation in the Japanese House—and nearly three times what it achieved in last year’s Upper Chamber election.

Anno’s party stood for election without aligning itself on the traditional axes of left and right. Instead, Team Mirai, heavily associated with young, urban voters, sought to unite across the ideological spectrum by taking a radical position on a different axis: the status quo and the future. Anno told us that Team Mirai believes it can triple its representation in the Diet after the next elections in each chamber, an ostentatious goal that seems achievable given their rapid rise over the past year.

In the American context, the idea of a small party unifying voters across left and right sounds like a pipe dream. But there is evidence it worked in Japan. Team Mirai won an impressive 11% of proportional representation votes from unaffiliated voters, nearly twice the share of the larger electorate. The centerpiece of the party’s policy platform is not about the traditional hot button issues, it’s about democracy itself, and how it can be enhanced by embracing a futuristic vision of digital democracy.

Anno told us how his party arrived at its manifesto for this month’s elections, and why it looked different from other parties’ in important ways. Team Mirai collected more than 38,000 online questions and more than 6,000 discrete policy suggestions from voters using its AI Policy app, which is advertised as a ‘manifesto that speaks for itself.’

After factoring in all this feedback, Team Mirai maintained a contrarian position on the biggest issue of the election: the sales tax and affordability. Rather than running on a reduction of the national sales tax like the major parties, Team Mirai reviewed dozens of suggestions from the public and ultimately proposed to keep that tax level while providing support to families through a child tax credit and lowering the required contribution for social insurance. Anno described this as another future-facing strategy: less price relief in the short term, but sustained funding for essential programs.

Anno has always intended to build a different kind of party. After receiving roughly $1 million in public funding apportioned to Team Mirai based on its single seat in the Upper Chamber last year, Anno began hiring engineers to enhance his software tools for digital democracy.

Anno described Team Mirai to us as a ‘utility party;’ basic infrastructure for Japanese democracy that serves the broader polity rather than one faction. Their Gikai (‘assembly’) app illustrates the point. It provides a portal for constituents to research bills, using AI to generate summaries, to describe their impacts, to surfacing media reporting on the issue, and to answer users’ questions. Like all their software, it’s open source and free for anyone, in any party, to use.

After last week’s victory, Team Mirai now has about $5 million in public funding and ambitions to grow the influence of their digital democracy platform. Anno told us Team Mirai has secured an agreement with the LDP, Japan’s dominant ruling party, to begin using Team Mirai’s Gikai and corruption-fighting Marumie financial transparency tool.

AI is the issue driving the most societal and economic change we will encounter in our lifetime, yet US political parties are largely silent. But AI and Big Tech companies and their owners are ramping up their political spending to influence the parties. To the extent that AI has shown up in our politics, it seems to be limited to the question of where to site the next generation of data centers and how to channel populist backlash to big tech.

Those are causes worthy of political organizing, but very few US politicians are leveraging the technology for public listening or other pro-democratic purposes. With the midterms still nine months away and with innovators like Team Mirai making products in the open for anyone to use, there is still plenty of time for an American politician to demonstrate what a new politics could look like.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.

Posted on March 24, 2026 at 7:03 AM • View Comments

Is AI Good for Democracy?

Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the scales in a superpower conflict.

But the most important arms race of the 21st century is already happening elsewhere and, while AI is definitely the weapon of choice, combatants are distributed across dozens of domains.

Academic journals are flooded with AI-generated papers, and are turning to AI to help review submissions. Brazil’s court system started using AI to triage cases, only to face an increasing volume of cases filed with AI help. Open source software developers are being overwhelmed with code contributions from bots. Newspapers, music, social media, education, investigative journalism, hiring, and procurement are all being disrupted by a massive expansion of AI use.

Each of these is an arms race. Adversaries within a system iteratively seeking an edge against their competition by continuously expanding their use of a common technology.

Beneficiaries of these arms races are US mega-corporations capturing wealth from the rest of us at an unprecedented rate. A substantial fraction of global economy has reoriented around AI in just the past few years, and that trend is accelerating. In parallel, this industry’s lobbying interests are quickly becoming the object, rather than the subject, of US government power.

To understand these arms races, let’s look at an example of particular interest to democracies worldwide: how AI is changing the relationship between democratic government and citizens. Interactions that used to happen between people and elected representatives are expanding to a massive scale, with AIs taking the roles that humans once did.

In a notorious example from 2017, US Federal Communications Commission opened a comment platform on the web to get public input on internet regulation. It was quickly flooded with millions of comments fraudulently orchestrated by broadband providers to oppose FCC regulation of their industry. From the other side, a 19-yearold college student responded by submitting millions of comments of his own supporting the regulation. Both sides were using software primitive by the standards of today’s AI.

Nearly a decade later, it is getting harder for citizens to tell when they’re talking to a government bot, or when an online conversation about public policy is just bots talking to bots. When constituents leverage AI to communicate better, faster, and more, it pressures government officials to do the same.

This may sound futuristic, but it’s become a familiar reality in US. Staff in US Congress are using AI to make their constituent email correspondence more efficient. Politicians campaigning for office are adopting AI tools to automate fundraising and voter outreach. By one 2025 estimate, a fifth of public submissions to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were already being generated with AI assistance.

People and organizations are adopting AI here because it solves a real problem that has made mass advocacy campaigns ineffective in the past: quantity has been inversely proportional to both quality and relevance. It’s easy for government agencies to dismiss general comments in favour of more specific and actionable ones. That makes it hard for regular people to make their voices heard. Most of us don’t have the time to learn the specifics or to express ourselves in this kind of detail. AI makes that contextualization and personalization easy. And as the volume and length of constituent comments grow, agencies turn to AI to facilitate review and response.

That’s the arms race. People are using AI to submit comments, which requires those on the receiving end to use AI to wade through the comments received. To the extent that one side does attain an advantage, it will likely be temporary. And yet, there is real harm created when one side exploits another in these adversarial systems. Constituents of democracies lose out if their public servants use AI-generated responses to ignore and dismiss their voices rather than to listen to and include them. Scientific enterprise is weakened if fraudulent papers sloppily generated by AI overwhelm legitimate research.

As we write in our new book, Rewiring Democracy, the arms race dynamic is inevitable. Every actor in an adversarial system is incentivized and, in the absence of new regulation in this fast moving space, free to use new technologies to advance its own interests. Yet some of these examples are heartening. They signal that, even if you face an AI being used against you, there’s an opportunity to use the tech for your own benefit.

But, right now, it’s obvious who is benefiting most from AI. A handful of American Big Tech corps and their owners are extracting trillions of dollars from the manufacture of AI chips, development of AI data centers, and operation of so-called ‘frontier’ AI models. Regardless of which side pulls ahead in each arms race scenario, the house always wins. Corporate AI giants profit from the race dynamic itself.

As formidable as the near-monopoly positions of today’s Big Tech giants may seem, people and governments have substantial capability to fight back. Various democracies are resisting this concentration of wealth and power with tools of anti-trust regulation, protections for human rights, and public alternatives to corporate AI. All of us worried about the AI arms race and committed to preserving the interests of our communities and our democracies should think in both these terms: how to use the tech to our own advantage, and how to resist the concentration of power AI is being exploited to create.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Times of India.

Posted on February 24, 2026 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Are We Ready to Be Governed by Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) overlords are a common trope in science-fiction dystopias, but the reality looks much more prosaic. The technologies of artificial intelligence are already pervading many aspects of democratic government, affecting our lives in ways both large and small. This has occurred largely without our notice or consent. The result is a government incrementally transformed by AI rather than the singular technological overlord of the big screen.

Let us begin with the executive branch. One of the most important functions of this branch of government is to administer the law, including the human services on which so many Americans rely. Many of these programs have long been operated by a mix of humans and machines, even if not previously using modern AI tools such as Large Language Models.

A salient example is healthcare, where private insurers make widespread use of algorithms to review, approve, and deny coverage, even for recipients of public benefits like Medicare. While Biden-era guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) largely blesses this use of AI by Medicare Advantage operators, the practice of overriding the medical care recommendations made by physicians raises profound ethical questions, with life and death implications for about thirty million Americans today.

This April, the Trump administration reversed many administrative guardrails on AI, relieving Medicare Advantage plans from the obligation to avoid AI-enabled patient discrimination. This month, the Trump administration took a step further. CMS rolled out an aggressive new program that financially rewards vendors that leverage AI to reject rapidly prior authorization for "wasteful" physician or provider-requested medical services. The same month, the Trump administration also issued an executive order limiting the abilities of states to put consumer and patient protections around the use of AI.

This shows both growing confidence in AI’s efficiency and a deliberate choice to benefit from it without restricting its possible harms. Critics of the CMS program have characterized it as effectively establishing a bounty on denying care; AI—in this case—is being used to serve a ministerial function in applying that policy. But AI could equally be used to automate a different policy objective, such as minimizing the time required to approve pre-authorizations for necessary services or to minimize the effort required of providers to achieve authorization.

Next up is the judiciary. Setting aside concerns about activist judges and court overreach, jurists are not supposed to decide what law is. The function of judges and courts is to interpret the law written by others. Just as jurists have long turned to dictionaries and expert witnesses for assistance in their interpretation, AI has already emerged as a tool used by judges to infer legislative intent and decide on cases. In 2023, a Colombian judge was the first publicly to use AI to help make a ruling. The first known American federal example came a year later when United States Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom began using AI in his jurisprudence, to provide second "opinions" on the plain language meaning of words in statute. A District of Columbia Court of Appeals similarly used ChatGPT in 2025 to deliver an interpretation of what common knowledge is. And there are more examples from Latin America, the United Kingdom, India, and beyond.

Given that these examples are likely merely the tip of the iceberg, it is also important to remember that any judge can unilaterally choose to consult an AI while drafting his opinions, just as he may choose to consult other human beings, and a judge may be under no obligation to disclose when he does.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. AI has the ability to replace humans but also to augment human capabilities, which may significantly expand human agency. Whether the results are good or otherwise depends on many factors. These include the application and its situation, the characteristics and performance of the AI model, and the characteristics and performance of the humans it augments or replaces. This general model applies to the use of AI in the judiciary.

Each application of AI legitimately needs to be considered in its own context, but certain principles should apply in all uses of AI in democratic contexts. First and foremost, we argue, AI should be applied in ways that decentralize rather than concentrate power. It should be used to empower individual human actors rather than automating the decision-making of a central authority. We are open to independent judges selecting and leveraging AI models as tools in their own jurisprudence, but we remain concerned about Big Tech companies building and operating a dominant AI product that becomes widely used throughout the judiciary.

This principle brings us to the legislature. Policymakers worldwide are already using AI in many aspects of lawmaking. In 2023, the first law written entirely by AI was passed in Brazil. Within a year, the French government had produced its own AI model tailored to help the Parliament with the consideration of amendments. By the end of that year, the use of AI in legislative offices had become widespread enough that twenty percent of state-level staffers in the United States reported using it, and another forty percent were considering it.

These legislative members and staffers, collectively, face a significant choice: to wield AI in a way that concentrates or distributes power. If legislative offices use AI primarily to encode the policy prescriptions of party leadership or powerful interest groups, then they will effectively cede their own power to those central authorities. AI here serves only as a tool enabling that handover.

On the other hand, if legislative offices use AI to amplify their capacity to express and advocate for the policy positions of their principals—the elected representatives—they can strengthen their role in government. Additionally, AI can help them scale their ability to listen to many voices and synthesize input from their constituents, making it a powerful tool for better realizing democracy. We may prefer a legislator who translates his principles into the technical components and legislative language of bills with the aid of a trustworthy AI tool executing under his exclusive control rather than with the aid of lobbyists executing under the control of a corporate patron.

Examples from around the globe demonstrate how legislatures can use AI as tools for tapping into constituent feedback to drive policymaking. The European civic technology organization Make.org is organizing large-scale digital consultations on topics such as European peace and defense. The Scottish Parliament is funding the development of open civic deliberation tools such as Comhairle to help scale civic participation in policymaking. And Japanese Diet member Takahiro Anno and his party Team Mirai are showing how political innovators can build purpose-fit applications of AI to engage with voters.

AI is a power-enhancing technology. Whether it is used by a judge, a legislator, or a government agency, it enhances an entity’s ability to shape the world. This is both its greatest strength and its biggest danger. In the hands of someone who wants more democracy, AI will help that person. In the hands of a society that wants to distribute power, AI can help to execute that. But, in the hands of another person, or another society, bent on centralization, concentration of power, or authoritarianism, it can also be applied toward those ends.

We are not going to be fully governed by AI anytime soon, but we are already being governed with AI—and more is coming. Our challenge in these years is more a social than a technological one: to ensure that those doing the governing are doing so in the service of democracy.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Merion West.

Posted on December 29, 2025 at 7:07 AM • View Comments

Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide

Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities.

We have just published the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform Politics, Government, and Citizenship. In it, we take a clear-eyed view of how AI is undermining confidence in our information ecosystem, how the use of biased AI can harm constituents of democracies and how elected officials with authoritarian tendencies can use it to consolidate power. But we also give positive examples of how AI is transforming democratic governance and politics for the better.

Here are four such stories unfolding right now around the world, showing how AI is being used by some to make democracy better, stronger, and more responsive to people.

Japan

Last year, then 33-year-old engineer Takahiro Anno was a fringe candidate for governor of Tokyo. Running as an independent candidate, he ended up coming in fifth in a crowded field of 56, largely thanks to the unprecedented use of an authorized AI avatar. That avatar answered 8,600 questions from voters on a 17-day continuous YouTube livestream and garnered the attention of campaign innovators worldwide.

Two months ago, Anno-san was elected to Japan’s upper legislative chamber, again leveraging the power of AI to engage constituents—this time answering more than 20,000 questions. His new party, Team Mirai, is also an AI-enabled civic technology shop, producing software aimed at making governance better and more participatory. The party is leveraging its share of Japan’s public funding for political parties to build the Mirai Assembly app, enabling constituents to express opinions on and ask questions about bills in the legislature, and to organize those expressions using AI. The party promises that its members will direct their questioning in committee hearings based on public input.

Brazil

Brazil is notoriously litigious, with even more lawyers per capita than the US. The courts are chronically overwhelmed with cases and the resultant backlog costs the government billions to process. Estimates are that the Brazilian federal government spends about 1.6% of GDP per year operating the courts and another 2.5% to 3% of GDP issuing court-ordered payments from lawsuits the government has lost.

Since at least 2019, the Brazilian government has aggressively adopted AI to automate procedures throughout its judiciary. AI is not making judicial decisions, but aiding in distributing caseloads, performing legal research, transcribing hearings, identifying duplicative filings, preparing initial orders for signature and clustering similar cases for joint consideration: all things to make the judiciary system work more efficiently. And the results are significant; Brazil’s federal supreme court backlog, for example, dropped in 2025 to its lowest levels in 33 years.

While it seems clear that the courts are realizing efficiency benefits from leveraging AI, there is a postscript to the courts’ AI implementation project over the past five-plus years: the litigators are using these tools, too. Lawyers are using AI assistance to file cases in Brazilian courts at an unprecedented rate, with new cases growing by nearly 40% in volume over the past five years.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing for Brazilian litigators to regain the upper hand in this arms race. It has been argued that litigation, particularly against the government, is a vital form of civic participation, essential to the self-governance function of democracy. Other democracies’ court systems should study and learn from Brazil’s experience and seek to use technology to maximize the bandwidth and liquidity of the courts to process litigation.

Germany

Now, we move to Europe and innovations in informing voters. Since 2002, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education has operated a non-partisan voting guide called Wahl-o-Mat. Officials convene an editorial team of 24 young voters (under 26 and selected for diversity) with experts from science and education to develop a slate of 80 questions. The questions are put to all registered German political parties. The responses are narrowed down to 38 key topics and then published online in a quiz format that voters can use to identify the party whose platform they most identify with.

In the past two years, outside groups have been innovating alternatives to the official Wahl-o-Mat guide that leverage AI. First came Wahlweise, a product of the German AI company AIUI. Second, students at the Technical University of Munich deployed an interactive AI system called Wahl.chat. This tool was used by more than 150,000 people within the first four months. In both cases, instead of having to read static webpages about the positions of various political parties, citizens can engage in an interactive conversation with an AI system to more easily get the same information contextualized to their individual interests and questions.

However, German researchers studying the reliability of such AI tools ahead of the 2025 German federal election raised significant concerns about bias and “hallucinations”—AI tools making up false information. Acknowledging the potential of the technology to increase voter informedness and party transparency, the researchers recommended adopting scientific evaluations comparable to those used in the Agency for Civic Education’s official tool to improve and institutionalize the technology.

United States

Finally, the US—in particular, California, home to CalMatters, a non-profit, nonpartisan news organization. Since 2023, its Digital Democracy project has been collecting every public utterance of California elected officials—every floor speech, comment made in committee and social media post, along with their voting records, legislation, and campaign contributions—and making all that information available in a free online platform.

CalMatters this year launched a new feature that takes this kind of civic watchdog function a big step further. Its AI Tip Sheets feature uses AI to search through all of this data, looking for anomalies, such as a change in voting position tied to a large campaign contribution. These anomalies appear on a webpage that journalists can access to give them story ideas and a source of data and analysis to drive further reporting.

This is not AI replacing human journalists; it is a civic watchdog organization using technology to feed evidence-based insights to human reporters. And it’s no coincidence that this innovation arose from a new kind of media institution—a non-profit news agency. As the watchdog function of the fourth estate continues to be degraded by the decline of newspapers’ business models, this kind of technological support is a valuable contribution to help a reduced number of human journalists retain something of the scope of action and impact our democracy relies on them for.

These are just four of many stories from around the globe of AI helping to make democracy stronger. The common thread is that the technology is distributing rather than concentrating power. In all four cases, it is being used to assist people performing their democratic tasks—politics in Japan, litigation in Brazil, voting in Germany and watchdog journalism in California—rather than replacing them.

In none of these cases is the AI doing something that humans can’t perfectly competently do. But in all of these cases, we don’t have enough available humans to do the jobs on their own. A sufficiently trustworthy AI can fill in gaps: amplify the power of civil servants and citizens, improve efficiency, and facilitate engagement between government and the public.

One of the barriers towards realizing this vision more broadly is the AI market itself. The core technologies are largely being created and marketed by US tech giants. We don’t know the details of their development: on what material they were trained, what guardrails are designed to shape their behavior, what biases and values are encoded into their systems. And, even worse, we don’t get a say in the choices associated with those details or how they should change over time. In many cases, it’s an unacceptable risk to use these for-profit, proprietary AI systems in democratic contexts.

To address that, we have long advocated for the development of “public AI”: models and AI systems that are developed under democratic control and deployed for public benefit, not sold by corporations to benefit their shareholders. The movement for this is growing worldwide.

Switzerland has recently released the world’s most powerful and fully realized public AI model. It’s called Apertus, and it was developed jointly by public Swiss institutions: the universities ETH
Zurich and EPFL, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). The development team has made it entirely open source–open data, open code, open weights—and free for anyone to use. No illegally acquired copyrighted works were used in its training. It doesn’t exploit poorly paid human laborers from the global south. Its performance is about where the large corporate giants were a year ago, which is more than good enough for many applications. And it demonstrates that it’s not necessary to spend trillions of dollars creating these models. Apertus takes a huge step forward to realizing the vision of an alternative to big tech—controlled corporate AI.

AI technology is not without its costs and risks, and we are not here to minimize them. But the technology has significant benefits as well.

AI is inherently power-enhancing, and it can magnify what the humans behind it want to do. It can enhance authoritarianism as easily as it can enhance democracy. It’s up to us to steer the technology in that better direction. If more citizen watchdogs and litigators use AI to amplify their power to oversee government and hold it accountable, if more political parties and election administrators use it to engage meaningfully with and inform voters and if more governments provide democratic alternatives to big tech’s AI offerings, society will be better off.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

Posted on November 25, 2025 at 7:00 AM • View Comments

AI and Voter Engagement

Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way.

In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social media into his political campaign: Barack Obama. His campaign’s use of social media was so bracingly innovative, so impactful, that it was viewed by journalist David Talbot and others as the strategy that enabled the first term Senator to win the White House.

Over the past few years, a new technology has become mainstream: AI. But still, no candidate has unlocked AI’s potential to revolutionize political campaigns. Americans have three more years to wait before casting their ballots in another Presidential election, but we can look at the 2026 midterms and examples from around the globe for signs of how that breakthrough might occur.

How Obama Did It

Rereading the contemporaneous reflections of the New York Times’ late media critic, David Carr, on Obama’s campaign reminds us of just how new social media felt in 2008. Carr positions it within a now-familiar lineage of revolutionary communications technologies from newspapers to radio to television to the internet.

The Obama campaign and administration demonstrated that social media was different from those earlier communications technologies, including the pre-social internet. Yes, increasing numbers of voters were getting their news from the internet, and content about the then-Senator sometimes made a splash by going viral. But those were still broadcast communications: one voice reaching many. Obama found ways to connect voters to each other.

In describing what social media revolutionized in campaigning, Carr quotes campaign vendor Blue State Digital’s Thomas Gensemer: “People will continue to expect a conversation, a two-way relationship that is a give and take.”

The Obama team made some earnest efforts to realize this vision. His transition team launched change.gov, the website where the campaign collected a “Citizen’s Briefing Book” of public comment. Later, his administration built We the People, an online petitioning platform.

But the lasting legacy of Obama’s 2008 campaign, as political scientists Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna chronicled, was pioneering online “relational organizing.” This technique enlisted individuals as organizers to activate their friends in a self-perpetuating web of relationships.

Perhaps because of the Obama campaign’s close association with the method, relational organizing has been touted repeatedly as the linchpin of Democratic campaigns: in 2020, 2024, and today. But research by non-partisan groups like Turnout Nation and right-aligned groups like the Center for Campaign Innovation has also empirically validated the effectiveness of the technique for inspiring voter turnout within connected groups.

The Facebook of 2008 worked well for relational organizing. It gave users tools to connect and promote ideas to the people they know: college classmates, neighbors, friends from work or church. But the nature of social networking has changed since then.

For the past decade, according to Pew Research, Facebook use has stalled and lagged behind YouTube, while Reddit and TikTok have surged. These platforms are less useful for relational organizing, at least in the traditional sense. YouTube is organized more like broadcast television, where content creators produce content disseminated on their own channels in a largely one-way communication to their fans. Reddit gathers users worldwide in forums (subreddits) organized primarily on topical interest. The endless feed of TikTok’s “For You” page disseminates engaging content with little ideological or social commonality. None of these platforms shares the essential feature of Facebook c. 2008: an organizational structure that emphasizes direct connection to people that users have direct social influence over.

AI and Relational Organizing

Ideas and messages might spread virally through modern social channels, but they are not where you convince your friends to show up at a campaign rally. Today’s platforms are spaces for political hobbyism, where you express your political feelings and see others express theirs.

Relational organizing works when one person’s action inspires others to do this same. That’s inherently a chain of human-to-human connection. If my AI assistant inspires your AI assistant, no human notices and one’s vote changes. But key steps in the human chain can be assisted by AI. Tell your phone’s AI assistant to craft a personal message to one friend—or a hundred—and it can do it.

So if a campaign hits you at the right time with the right message, they might persuade you to task your AI assistant to ask your friends to donate or volunteer. The result can be something more than a form letter; it could be automatically drafted based on the entirety of your email or text correspondence with that friend. It could include references to your discussions of recent events, or past campaigns, or shared personal experiences. It could sound as authentic as if you’d written it from the heart, but scaled to everyone in your address book.

Research suggests that AI can generate and perform written political messaging about as well as humans. AI will surely play a tactical role in the 2026 midterm campaigns, and some candidates may even use it for relational organizing in this way.

(Artificial) Identity Politics

For AI to be truly transformative of politics, it must change the way campaigns work. And we are starting to see that in the US.

The earliest uses of AI in American political campaigns are, to be polite, uninspiring. Candidates viewed them as just another tool to optimize an endless stream of email and text message appeals, to ramp up political vitriol, to harvest data on voters and donors, or merely as a stunt.

Of course, we have seen the rampant production and spread of AI-powered deepfakes and misinformation. This is already impacting the key 2026 Senate races, which are likely to attract hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. Roy Cooper, Democratic candidate for US Senate from North Carolina, and Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic candidate for Senate from Michigan, were both targeted by viral deepfake attacks in recent months. This may reflect a growing trend in Donald Trump’s Republican party in the use of AI-generated imagery to build up GOP candidates and assail the opposition.

And yet, in the global elections of 2024, AI was used more memetically than deceptively. So far, conservative and far right parties seem to have adopted this most aggressively. The ongoing rise of Germany’s far-right populist AfD party has been credited to its use of AI to generate nostalgic and evocative (and, to many, offensive) campaign images, videos, and music and, seemingly as a result, they have dominated TikTok. Because most social platforms’ algorithms are tuned to reward media that generates an emotional response, this counts as a double use of AI: to generate content and to manipulate its distribution.

AI can also be used to generate politically useful, though artificial, identities. These identities can fulfill different roles than humans in campaigning and governance because they have differentiated traits. They can’t be imprisoned for speaking out against the state, can be positioned (legitimately or not) as unsusceptible to bribery, and can be forced to show up when humans will not.

In Venezuela, journalists have turned to AI avatars—artificial newsreaders—to report anonymously on issues that would otherwise elicit government retaliation. Albania recently “appointed” an AI to a ministerial post responsible for procurement, claiming that it would be less vulnerable to bribery than a human. In Virginia, both in 2024 and again this year, candidates have used AI avatars as artificial stand-ins for opponents that refused to debate them.

And yet, none of these examples, whether positive or negative, pursue the promise of the Obama campaign: to make voter engagement a “two-way conversation” on a massive scale.

The closest so far to fulfilling that vision anywhere in the world may be Japan’s new political party, Team Mirai. It started in 2024, when an independent Tokyo gubernatorial candidate, Anno Takahiro, used an AI avatar on YouTube to respond to 8,600 constituent questions over a seventeen-day continuous livestream. He collated hundreds of comments on his campaign manifesto into a revised policy platform. While he didn’t win his race, he shot up to a fifth place finish among a record 56 candidates.

Anno was RECENTLY elected to the upper house of the federal legislature as the founder of a new party with a 100 day plan to bring his vision of a “public listening AI” to the whole country. In the early stages of that plan, they’ve invested their share of Japan’s 32 billion yen in party grants—public subsidies for political parties—to hire engineers building digital civic infrastructure for Japan. They’ve already created platforms to provide transparency for party expenditures, and to use AI to make legislation in the Diet easy, and are meeting with engineers from US-based Jigsaw Labs (a Google company) to learn from international examples of how AI can be used to power participatory democracy.

Team Mirai has yet to prove that it can get a second member elected to the Japanese Diet, let alone to win substantial power, but they’re innovating and demonstrating new ways of using AI to give people a way to participate in politics that we believe is likely to spread.

Organizing with AI

AI could be used in the US in similar ways. Following American federalism’s longstanding model of “laboratories of democracy,” we expect the most aggressive campaign innovation to happen at the state and local level.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is partnering with MIT and Stanford labs to use the AI-based tool deliberation.io to capture wide scale public feedback in city policymaking about AI. Her administration said that using AI in this process allows “the District to better solicit public input to ensure a broad range of perspectives, identify common ground, and cultivate solutions that align with the public interest.”

It remains to be seen how central this will become to Bowser’s expected re-election campaign in 2026, but the technology has legitimate potential to be a prominent part of a broader program to rebuild trust in government. This is a trail blazed by Taiwan a decade ago. The vTaiwan initiative showed how digital tools like Pol.is, which uses machine learning to make sense of real time constituent feedback, can scale participation in democratic processes and radically improve trust in government. Similar AI listening processes have been used in Kentucky, France, and Germany.

Even if campaigns like Bowser’s don’t adopt this kind of AI-facilitated listening and dialog, expect it to be an increasingly prominent part of American public debate. Through a partnership with Jigsaw, Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan Institute will use AI to elicit and synthesize the views of at least five Americans from every Congressional district in a project called “We the People.” Timed to coincide with the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026, expect the results to be promoted during the heat of the midterm campaign and to stoke interest in this kind of AI-assisted political sensemaking.

In the year where we celebrate the American republic’s semiquincentennial and continue a decade-long debate about whether or not Donald Trump and the Republican party remade in his image is fighting for the interests of the working class, representation will be on the ballot in 2026. Midterm election candidates will look for any way they can get an edge. For all the risks it poses to democracy, AI presents a real opportunity, too, for politicians to engage voters en masse while factoring their input into their platform and message. Technology isn’t going to turn an uninspiring candidate into Barack Obama, but it gives any aspirant to office the capability to try to realize the promise that swept him into office.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Fulcrum.

Posted on November 18, 2025 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

Will AI Strengthen or Undermine Democracy?

Listen to the Audio on NextBigIdeaClub.com

Below, co-authors Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders share five key insights from their new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship.

What’s the big idea?

AI can be used both for and against the public interest within democracies. It is already being used in the governing of nations around the world, and there is no escaping its continued use in the future by leaders, policy makers, and legal enforcers. How we wire AI into democracy today will determine if it becomes a tool of oppression or empowerment.

1. AI’s global democratic impact is already profound.

It’s been just a few years since ChatGPT stormed into view and AI’s influence has already permeated every democratic process in governments around the world:

  • In 2022, an artist collective in Denmark founded the world’s first political party committed to an AI-generated policy platform.
  • Also in 2022, South Korean politicians running for the presidency were the first to use AI avatars to communicate with voters en masse.
  • In 2023, a Brazilian municipal legislator passed the first enacted law written by AI.
  • In 2024, a U.S. federal court judge started using AI to interpret the plain meaning of words in U.S. law.
  • Also in 2024, the Biden administration disclosed more than two thousand discrete use cases for AI across the agencies of the U.S. federal government.

The examples illustrate the diverse uses of AI across citizenship, politics, legislation, the judiciary, and executive administration.

Not all of these uses will create lasting change. Some of these will be one-offs. Some are inherently small in scale. Some were publicity stunts. But each use case speaks to a shifting balance of supply and demand that AI will increasingly mediate.

Legislators need assistance drafting bills and have limited staff resources, especially at the local and state level. Historically, they have looked to lobbyists and interest groups for help. Increasingly, it’s just as easy for them to use an AI tool.

2. The first places AI will be used are where there is the least public oversight.

Many of the use cases for AI in governance and politics have vocal objectors. Some make us uncomfortable, especially in the hands of authoritarians or ideological extremists.

In some cases, politics will be a regulating force to prevent dangerous uses of AI. Massachusetts has banned the use of AI face recognition in law enforcement because of real concerns voiced by the public about their tendency to encode systems of racial bias.

Some of the uses we think might be most impactful are unlikely to be adopted fast because of legitimate concern about their potential to make mistakes, introduce bias, or subvert human agency. AIs could be assistive tools for citizens, acting as their voting proxies to help us weigh in on larger numbers of more complex ballot initiatives, but we know that many will object to anything that verges on AIs being given a vote.

But AI will continue to be rapidly adopted in some aspects of democracy, regardless of how the public feels. People within democracies, even those in government jobs, often have great independence. They don’t have to ask anyone if it’s ok to use AI, and they will use it if they see that it benefits them. The Brazilian city councilor who used AI to draft a bill did not ask for anyone’s permission. The U.S. federal judge who used AI to help him interpret law did not have to check with anyone first. And the Trump administration seems to be using AI for everything from drafting tariff policies to writing public health reports—with some obvious drawbacks.

It’s likely that even the thousands of disclosed AI uses in government are only the tip of the iceberg. These are just the applications that governments have seen fit to share; the ones they think are the best vetted, most likely to persist, or maybe the least controversial to disclose.

3. Elites and authoritarians will use AI to concentrate power.

Many Westerners point to China as a cautionary tale of how AI could empower autocracy, but the reality is that AI provides structural advantages to entrenched power in democratic governments, too. The nature of automation is that it gives those at the top of a power structure more control over the actions taken at its lower levels.

It’s famously hard for newly elected leaders to exert their will over the many layers of human bureaucracies. The civil service is large, unwieldy, and messy. But it’s trivial for an executive to change the parameters and instructions of an AI model being used to automate the systems of government.

The dynamic of AI effectuating concentration of power extends beyond government agencies. Over the past five years, Ohio has undertaken a project to do a wholesale revision of its administrative code using AI. The leaders of that project framed it in terms of efficiency and good governance: deleting millions of words of outdated, unnecessary, or redundant language. The same technology could be applied to advance more ideological ends, like purging all statutory language that places burdens on business, neglects to hold businesses accountable, protects some class of people, or fails to protect others.

Whether you like or despise automating the enactment of those policies will depend on whether you stand with or are opposed to those in power, and that’s the point. AI gives any faction with power the potential to exert more control over the levers of government.

4. Organizers will find ways to use AI to distribute power instead.

We don’t have to resign ourselves to a world where AI makes the rich richer and the elite more powerful. This is a technology that can also be wielded by outsiders to help level the playing field.

In politics, AI gives upstart and local candidates access to skills and the ability to do work on a scale that used to only be available to well-funded campaigns. In the 2024 cycle, Congressional candidates running against incumbents like Glenn Cook in Georgia and Shamaine Daniels in Pennsylvania used AI to help themselves be everywhere all at once. They used AI to make personalized robocalls to voters, write frequent blog posts, and even generate podcasts in the candidate’s voice. In Japan, a candidate for Governor of Tokyo used an AI avatar to respond to more than eight thousand online questions from voters.

Outside of public politics, labor organizers are also leveraging AI to build power. The Worker’s Lab is a U.S. nonprofit developing assistive technologies for labor unions, like AI-enabled apps that help service workers report workplace safety violations. The 2023 Writers’ Guild of America strike serves as a blueprint for organizers. They won concessions from Hollywood studios that protect their members against being displaced by AI while also winning them guarantees for being able to use AI as assistive tools to their own benefit.

5. The ultimate democratic impact of AI depends on us.

If you are excited about AI and see the potential for it to make life, and maybe even democracy, better around the world, recognize that there are a lot of people who don’t feel the same way.

If you are disturbed about the ways you see AI being used and worried about the future that leads to, recognize that the trajectory we’re on now is not the only one available.

The technology of AI itself does not pose an inherent threat to citizens, workers, and the public interest. Like other democratic technologies—voting processes, legislative districts, judicial review—its impacts will depend on how it’s developed, who controls it, and how it’s used.

Constituents of democracies should do four things:

  • Reform the technology ecosystem to be more trustworthy, so that AI is developed with more transparency, more guardrails around exploitative use of data, and public oversight.
  • Resist inappropriate uses of AI in government and politics, like facial recognition technologies that automate surveillance and encode inequity.
  • Responsibly use AI in government where it can help improve outcomes, like making government more accessible to people through translation and speeding up administrative decision processes.
  • Renovate the systems of government vulnerable to the disruptive potential of AI’s superhuman capabilities, like political advertising rules that never anticipated deepfakes.

These four Rs are how we can rewire our democracy in a way that applies AI to truly benefit the public interest.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Next Big Idea Club.

EDITED TO ADD (11/6): This essay was republished by Fast Company.

Posted on October 31, 2025 at 7:08 AM • View Comments

Rewiring Democracy is Coming Soon

My latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, will be published in just over a week. No reviews yet, but you can read chapters 12 and 34 (of 43 chapters total).

You can order the book pretty much everywhere, and a copy signed by me here.

Please help spread the word. I want this book to make a splash when it’s public. Leave a review on whatever site you buy it from. Or make a TikTok video. Or do whatever you kids do these days. Is anyone a Slashdot contributor? I’d like the book to be announced there.

Posted on October 13, 2025 at 12:36 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.