A recent Reboot Democracy series, co-authored by the head of the Brazilian Senate's e-Citizenship Office, describes how the Brazilian Senate is—and hopes to expand—using artificial intelligence to enable greater citizen engagement in lawmaking. In this blog post, the former director of the Hacker Lab in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies reflects on how artificial intelligence can deepen deliberative democracy in Brazil—and the challenges we still face.

The Brazilian Senate's Public Consultation system has gathered over 30 million yes/no votes on legislation in the past decade from 15 million registered citizens. While these inputs provide lawmakers with basic public sentiment data, AI enhancements could transform the system by creating understandable bill summaries, simulating legislation impacts, synthesizing citizen feedback beyond yes/no responses, matching bills to citizens' interests, and enabling cross-border collaboration – evolving Brazil's engagement framework into a model for participatory democracy.

New Jersey's State AI Task Force used AI to develop more robust recommendations faster and with the benefit of large-scale community engagement. The Task Force used the online engagement tool All Our Ideas to prioritize a set of problems to focus on and used the AI-powered toolkit Policy Synth to conduct large-scale automated web research about the problems and possible solutions. As a result of this eight-week process, New Jersey is implementing free AI skills training for all public servants and developing an AI-powered labor market monitoring system to help workers navigate career trends.

The Brazilian Senate's Legislative Workshop program teaches students how to develop legislative proposals in classroom settings. In 2023, over 1,500 teachers implemented these workshops across 100 cities, with 10% of all submissions to the Senate’s e-Citizenship portal now coming from educational institutions. The Senate is exploring AI enhancements to personalize learning, facilitate collaboration between schools, create legislative simulations, provide instant feedback, and help students navigate ethical considerations – fostering a more engaged future citizenry.

The proliferation and collection of large amounts of citizens’ data has led to the rise of "political machines" – AI systems used in government to make decisions around resource allocation. Political anthropologist Eduardo Albrecht argues that establishing a "Third House" – a new legislative body specifically designed to oversee the deployment and operation of political machines – could enable citizens to meaningfully engage with and oversee the AI tools used by their government.

Brazil's Senate has revolutionized citizen engagement, fielding 69,000 public questions across 440 committee hearings in 2024, with senators responding to 90%. Now deploying AI to select relevant questions, create accessible summaries, and potentially enable real-time transcription, the Senate aims to make democratic participation more efficient and inclusive while maintaining diverse representation.

In the news this week: The Reboot Blog on why state leaders are meeting at Princeton University this June to develop practical frameworks for responsible AI use. A new series with the head of citizen engagement for the Brazilian Senate explores how artificial intelligence could enhance participatory lawmaking. The struggle to shape American AI policy intensifies with the Federation of American Scientists urging the Trump administration to cement US leadership through research investments, while tech companies actively lobby against state AI regulation. Google's Jigsaw upgrades its moderation tools for online communities. Fresh research from Harvard and Wharton reveals AI excels as a team player, while Elon University’s Lee Rainie explores our complex love-hate relationship with emerging technologies. Learn more in this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.

While federal AI policy shifts toward deregulation, my fellow state AI leaders will gather in June with researchers, entrepreneurs, and technologists at Princeton University under the auspices of the National Governors Association, the Center for Public Sector AI, the NJ AI Hub, InnovateUS and the Center for Information Technology Policy, to develop practical frameworks for responsible AI implementation in government. The two-day working conference will focus on: expanding equitable access, building public trust, strengthening governance, unlocking data responsibly, and driving innovation aligned with democratic principles.

Brazil's Federal Senate has pioneered four innovative citizen participation mechanisms that transform ordinary Brazilians from occasional voters into active lawmakers, with over 120,000 legislative ideas submitted and 11 million votes cast. Based on interviews with the head of the Brazilian Senate's e-Citizenship office and a leading expert on legislative innovation in Brazil, this series of four posts explores Brazil's current democratic ecosystem and future aspirations for how artificial intelligence could make citizen participation even more impactful.

Many Americans are fearful in important ways about AI – particularly generative AI and large language models (LLMs) – and yet the user base is exploding. New research from the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University looks at our love-hate relationship with emerging technologies.

In the news this week: A report from the Center for Democracy & Technology finds that civic tech organizations in Mexico & Taiwan effectively used AI tools to combat AI-driven information in last year’s elections while Cornell’s Frank Pasquale argues that AI poses a threat to democratic processes. Reversing course from the Biden Administration, the Trump administration instructs AI scientists to remove terms like "AI safety" and "fairness" in favor of "reducing ideological bias" and developing tools that “expand America’s global AI position.” Ivy leaguers are flooding Chinese AI company Deep Seek with applications. An NYU study finds that TikTok's algorithm skewed toward promoting Republican content during the 2024 election, and our partners at InnovateUS launch Spanish-language AI workshops. Read more in this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.

Constitutional courts remain disconnected from the citizens they ultimately serve, but AI could transform this relationship. By using technology to translate complex legal language into accessible information, create thoughtful digital forums for diverse public input, and develop collaborative mechanisms that allow citizens and experts to contribute directly to judicial decisions, courts can evolve from isolated institutions into centers of meaningful democratic engagement.

The GovLab with the support of the Wellcome Trust Discovery Research team is beginning a new initiative called Social Data 4 Health. The initiative aims to understand how these new forms of social data can transform health-related research in the humanities, social sciences, and public health domains.

On February 11, 2025, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and Urban AI co-hosted an official side event of the Paris AI Action Summit, titled "Aligning Urban AI and Global AI Governance." Held in collaboration with Mouvement des Entreprises de France (MEDEF), Open Data France, DemocracyNext, and UN-Habitat, the event brought together policymakers, researchers, and city representatives to discuss how urban AI initiatives can align with broader governance frameworks to ensure responsible and inclusive AI deployment. 

The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) currently funds multiyear technology projects to help agencies improve their service delivery. However, many agencies abdicate responsibility for project outcomes to vendors, lacking the internal leadership and project development teams necessary to apply a product model approach focused on user needs, starting small, learning what works, and making adjustments as needed. 

Why responsible data stewardship could help addressing today’s pressing environmental challenges resulting from artificial intelligence and other data-related technologies.

Today, we're excited to announce the launch of the newly updated AI Localism Repository—a curated resource designed to help local governments, researchers, and citizens understand how AI is being governed at the state, city, or community level.

This week, The GovLab and the Burnes Center for Social Change published two new resources aimed at leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to tackle pressing public challenges. 

In the Open Data Policy Lab's new report, the team provides a framework and recommendations to support open data providers and other interested parties in making open data “ready” for generative AI.

On April 17, 2024, during AI Week, The GovLab and UrbanAI hosted a webinar on AI localism, titled "Empowering Communities through Digital Self-Determination". The session aimed at investigating how AI governance can be localized to better serve community-specific needs.

Hannah Garden-Monheit, Director of the Office of Policy Planning of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) talks with Seth Harris on the Power at Work Blog about the FTC's new rule banning almost all non-compete agreements in employment relationships. 

To increase civic trust, we need to know what we mean by it and how to measure it, which turns out to be a challenging exercise. Toward that end, The GovLab at New York University and the New York Civic Engagement Commission joined forces to catalogue and identify methodologies to quantify and understand the nuances of civic trust.