Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Annie Lowrey: “Nobody likes doing paperwork, and Americans do a lot of it. Filing your taxes and getting a driver’s license is bad enough. Negotiating with your doctor and insurer or getting out of a rental contract is worse. And accessing disaster assistance, unemployment, disability, or Medicaid can be a nightmare, the stakes life-or-death. If time is money, the hoops we jump through to comply with the rules are one more bill we as citizens are forced to pay, and an extortionate one.

Journalist Annie Lowrey has termed this the “time tax”: the paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens when they access the rights and benefits that are supposed to be theirs. How did the world’s wealthiest country end up with such a convoluted, punitive, and inept system of public administration and so much fine print larding up everyday life? Lowrey traces a pathbreaking history of administrative burdens in the United States from the colonial era to today, revealing how they were historically a tool of discrimination. And she examines the contemporary effect of time taxes on the public, from how they entrench poverty to how they reduce trust in government.

Lowrey diagnoses the problem and gives this miserable experience a name—and she shows that it doesn’t have to be this way. Other countries have made cutting red tape a priority. There’s no reason we can’t do the same. The Time Tax will enrage you, enlighten you, and, most important, provide a point-by-point guide for reclaiming your precious time…(More)”.

Article by Joanna Partridge: “Bogus insurance claims worth more than £230m were detected by the insurance firm Aviva last year as scammers tried new tricks including using artificial intelligence to fake car accident scenes, documents and to exaggerate damage.

The insurer identified more than 18,400 suspect claims across its brands in 2025, with a combined value of £233m. The fraud claims level was a record for the insurer, although this was the first year that it included the Direct Line brands it acquired last summer.

Pete Ward, the head of claims counter fraud at Aviva, said fraud “isn’t a victimless crime – it drives up the cost of insurance for everyone”. He added: “We’re seeing fraud become more sophisticated, from exaggerated claims to the use of AI‑generated documents.”

Looking at Aviva’s UK general insurance business only, excluding Direct Line brands, motor insurance fraud accounted for most bogus claims detected, representing more than seven in 10 cases.

Fraudsters were moving away from staged collisions and towards exaggerated claims for vehicle damage, repair costs, credit hire and injury, often using wider cost pressures as justification, the insurer said. As a result, the value of motor fraud detected rose by 39%…(More)”.

Paper by Aleixandre Brian Duche-Pérez et al: “Artificial intelligence is increasingly promoted as a tool for modernizing public administration, accelerating decision-making, improving public services, and reducing administrative costs. Yet, in heterogeneous Global South contexts shaped by structural inequality, technological dependency, unequal access to digital infrastructure, and uneven institutional capacity, algorithmic efficiency may also generate new forms of democratic exclusion. This article develops a normative conceptual analysis of AI governance and argues that public uses of AI should not be evaluated primarily through technical efficiency, ethical compliance, or procedural safeguards, but through democratic legitimacy. It proposes the concept of democratic algorithmic legitimacy, understood as a relational property of the sociotechnical and institutional arrangements through which public authority is exercised with the support of AI. Such arrangements are legitimate when their purposes and operation can be publicly justified to affected persons, when those persons have meaningful opportunities to influence and contest their use, and when responsible institutions retain the authority and capacity to review decisions, repair unjustified harms, modify systems, suspend their operation, or withdraw them when necessary. The framework operationalizes this standard through seven interdependent dimensions: transparency, participation, inclusion, accountability, contestability, correctability, and social justice. This conceptual architecture distinguishes technical performance from democratic authority and explains why efficient outcomes cannot compensate automatically for exclusion, opacity, weak accountability, inaccessible contestation, or ineffective correction. The article identifies interconnected structural, institutional, social, and democratic risks associated with AI deployment in unequal sociotechnical environments and outlines a governance agenda based on meaningful public participation, democratic impact assessment, independent scrutiny, institutional guarantees of explanation, review and appeal, protection of affected groups, public control, technological capacity, and context-sensitive regulation. The article concludes that AI governance should be assessed not only by what computational systems optimize, but by whether societies retain the democratic authority to shape, question, supervise, correct, and, when necessary, reject their use…(More)”.

Article by Caryn Mohr: “As co-founder of First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR), Michael Running Wolf (Lakota, Cheyenne) works on the cusp of technological innovation. FLAIR uses artificial intelligence to reclaim Indigenous languages through speech-recognition models that help communities preserve and pass on their linguistic traditions. His work is cutting edge, but Running Wolf draws from the past to characterize today’s digital transition.

“We’re in a moment now where it’s like 1998, and the Internet’s about to be big,” Running Wolf said at Sovereignty in Numbers: The 2026 Center for Indian Country Development Data Summit on June 25. “We can invest ourselves in AI, or we can let AI bypass Indian Country and not participate in the new economy. We have an opportunity here to be early.”

Tribal leaders speaking at the event explored how tribes are establishing the data governance systems needed to guide a variety of economic decision-making in a world of rapidly changing technology. They described using economic data to restore land, diversify tribal revenue streams, and finance capital projects. Across topics, they characterized the stewardship of tribal data as a sovereign obligation…

CICD Director Casey Lozar (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) and Research Professor and American Indian Policy Institute (AIPI) Executive Director Traci Morris (Chickasaw Nation) kicked off the event with a fireside chat about an emerging topic for tribal and other forms of government: digital sovereignty. Morris, who is a scholar in this space, defined tribal digital sovereignty as “the exercise of self-determination and governance over a tribal nation’s digital presence.” The term encompasses everything from a tribe’s airwaves and broadband infrastructure to how the tribe collects, stores, uses, and shares its tribal data.

One way to think about a tribe’s data infrastructure is as digital land, Morris said. “Getting tribal data sovereignty right is as important as protecting the land. It’s the digital age, and data is our territory. It carries our people, our languages, our future generations.”..(More)”.

Blog by Anthropic: “…This spring, we piloted a program in which three external research institutions designed and ran their own studies on Claude usage data through Anthropic Insights (formerly named ‘Clio’), the privacy-preserving tool our own teams use to analyze usage patterns across millions of Claude conversations. We hope to scale this program in the future, so we also conducted an additional privacy audit of all data shared with third-party researchers to verify that our privacy protections held (see Appendix).

We believe this is the first time external researchers have run public independent studies on an AI company’s own usage data. Below, we discuss what the external teams found, what we learned running the pilot, and what we are weighing as we decide how to expand the program more widely. We are also publicly releasing the aggregate data from each project.

What the researchers learned

We partnered with three research groups: the Social and Language Technologies (SALT) Lab at Stanford University, the Human Information Processing Lab at the University of Oxford, and METR, a non-profit organization that evaluates frontier AI models. Each group developed its own research questions and used Anthropic Insights to conduct privacy-preserving analysis of roughly 250,000 Claude.ai or Claude Code conversations from April-May 2026.

We wanted our external partners to have as much independence as possible, so our contractual review rights were limited to user privacy, information that could help people violate our usage policies, Anthropic’s confidential information, and research accuracy. Anthropic otherwise had no say in the content of the findings and the researchers are free to publish their results even if they are inconvenient for Anthropic. Below are some early results. We’re excited about the directions, and about what others will find now that the data is public…(More)”.

Playbook by Jenrose Fitzgerald, Ally Terhaar, and Dan Ferris: “Data for Social Impact (DSI), an initiative of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, has played a key role in cultivating community data capacity in the St. Louis region—particularly at the organizational and collective levels. DSI has done this by building capacity among social sector organizations to work collaboratively with data across government, philanthropy, nonprofits, and impacted communities. This playbook outlines DSI’s approach to building community data capacity in St. Louis and lessons learned along the way…(More)”.

Paper by Joseph Lacey, Samuel Johnston, Leonardo Puleo and Jan Fabian Dollbaum: “Democratic scholarship maintains a consensus that rhetoric targeted at undermining free and fair elections is more threatening to democracy than transgressions of deliberative values. However, whether citizens democratic alarm systems are wired this way remains empirically untested. We explore this question using a preregistered survey experiment with 5,303 respondents across the US, England, Germany, and Italy. Our central finding is that citizens are significantly more disapproving of deliberative norm violations than of threats to electoral democracy’s core institutions. Our findings are consistent across countries and experimental variations in actor-contexts, where we test citizens’ attitudes to norm violations by three distinct actors: candidates, legislators, and journalists. Exploring our findings by the attitudinal profile of respondents, we find that those with more populist attitudes are more likely to be tolerant of electoral democracy violations and intolerant of deliberative violations. These results have significant implications for understanding public resistance to democratic backsliding…(More)”

Article by Zeynep Pamuk: “…What has always been missing in these debates is the idea that the public good of science goes far beyond the material benefits it delivers. Science certainly plays a key role in fueling economic growth, driving innovation, and improving health, but these functions do not exhaust its significance. On the contrary, science is the precondition of democratic government in modern societies. Unlike other public goods like public infrastructure or even art, science claims to provide fundamental truths that shape our most basic and objective understanding of the world, which in turn shape our ability to deliberate about political issues and hold policymakers accountable. Defenses of science that double down on its contribution to GDP or the treatment of disease miss this fundamental political function of scientific knowledge—something the Trump administration seems to understand.

It’s not just that claims to scientific truth are ubiquitous in policymaking, helping societies cope with uncertainty and change. Scientific claims can themselves drive new political agendas and become sources of uncertainty and change. Moreover, the way that scientists define problems and pursue solutions both offers political possibilities and restricts them. Whether the relationship between science and democracy is a productive one depends not only on the quality and reliability of knowledge a society produces but also on decisions about what types of knowledge are pursued and how. The power to fund science and decide on the distribution of funds is thus a fundamentally political power, and making science a truly public good requires giving citizens more say over its direction.

At first glance, the political review mandated by OMB’s recently proposed change to the federal grant system might seem to address these democratic deficits. But replacing the unaccountable judgment of scientific elites with the unaccountable judgment of presidential appointees—empowered to terminate research “for convenience” whenever priorities shift—is no improvement in democratic legitimacy. Neither is Kratsios’s recent report, Science: A New Golden Age, despite its embrace of mission-oriented projects. Heavy reliance on AI, increased emphasis on commercial incentives, and a reallocation of funding to the private sector will only further erode the public interest that publicly funded science should serve…(More)”.

Book by Cory Doctorow: “In modern tech parlance, a centaur is a person who is able to use technology to be a better, more productive version of themself. A reverse centaur is a person who is forced by technology to work at an inhuman pace—a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code.

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI is not another anti-AI screed. Cory Doctorow uses AI in his work every day. As a creative person, he has no moral or dogmatic issue with AI—he thinks the technology is useful, even exciting, and full of potential. And yet.

AI has arrived surrounded by unprecedented hype driven by a tech industry desperate to maintain its unprecedented valuation based on its own promises of endless financial growth. Despite the fact that almost all of AI’s real-world implementations have proved underwhelming, AI is projected to be worth more than $16 trillion—a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of “value,” every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

For Doctorow, it is imperative to see through that hype to the real story, to understand the technology not just for what it does, but for who it does it to and who it does it for. From that point of view, the story of AI is indeed dramatic and unprecedented, having generated an investment bubble so big that it endangers the entire world economy. In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI—as he so successfully did in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life “after” AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around…(More)”.

Essay by Jennifer Pahlka and Andrew Greenway: “..To truly reverse the dramatic decline in state capacity, governments need to take radical approaches that can win public trust. In his classic 1967 book, Inside Bureaucracy, the economist Anthony Downs described how institutions that lose their ability to adapt eventually embark on a slow death, becoming hollow shells of rules and procedures. Once they reach this point, he argued, they must be either reborn or destroyed. Today, advanced democracies around the world need to give serious attention to institutional rebirth—rebuilding state agencies into departments of now, unencumbered by people, precepts, and processes of past eras. But they also need to consider which legacy agencies are beyond reinvention and should be shut down altogether.

Not every broken institution has to be rebuilt from scratch. Governments do not have the time, resources, or political bandwidth to turn over the tables in every part of the state at once, nor would doing so be wise. Relentless, incremental improvement of existing agencies remains an important part of statecraft. But if they are going to solve the current crisis, democracies will have to get comfortable with creating new institutions. Curing what ails democracy today will require many things, but no other remedies will stick if governments can’t deliver what they promise.

TEST, LEARN, REPEAT

There is no single correct formula for institutional rebirth. An institution might be considered reborn when it has installed a new operating model that allows it to achieve its stated mission. Some legacy institutions hold valuable assets—authorities, data, know-how—that are not easy to move to a new home, so governments need to figure out how much of the existing system is irretrievably broken and what if anything needs to be preserved. It is critical to get the degree of newness right…(More)”.