Stefaan Verhulst
Policy note by the World Bank: “…examines how fragmented data infrastructures, policies, and institutional arrangements constrain digital transformation, public service delivery, and responsible artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the Philippines. The report highlights significant gaps in broadband connectivity, data governance, interoperability, data sharing frameworks, and institutional coordination, which limit the effective use of data for economic growth, social inclusion, disaster resilience, and government efficiency. Drawing on international experiences and a comprehensive assessment of the Philippine data ecosystem, the note proposes a reform agenda centered on trusted data sharing, harmonized digital public infrastructure, improved data governance, and stronger stewardship of national datasets. It recommends the development of interoperable registries, common identifiers, risk-based regulatory frameworks, and coordinated institutional mechanisms to support evidence-based policymaking and AI-ready data systems. The report concludes that unlocking the value of data through trusted, secure, and inclusive sharing practices is essential for accelerating digital transformation, enhancing public trust, fostering innovation, and enabling sustainable development in the Philippines…(More)”
Book by Anita Osorio et al: “…investigates the phenomenon of social and political assembly while speculating on the potential of proximity and urban (micro-)infrastructure as a form of cultural resistance. Around the globe, pluralist democratic culture is under populist attack, and we are increasingly confronted with the question of what kind of democracy one is referring to—as if there were many. On campuses, which have been historically considered sites of free speech and protest, forms of assembly are now being carefully curated; manicured like framed self-referential objects in a white cube.
As an initial point of departure, Infrastructuring Assemblies delivers a series of conceptual framings and door openers around the notion of urban agonism. Contrary to the conception of spatial production as an autonomous object with singular authorship, it argues that the methodologies inherent in critical spatial practices are crucial to activate processes of public negotiation and everyday urbanism in conversation and exchange with its environment. The action that is being described here will be referred to as infrastructuring—something you do rather than taking it for granted.
When we consider forms of urban resistance, we may think of temporary instances such as the global Occupy! movement, the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, or most recently, the student protests across campuses in the United States. All of those modes of resistance have one aspect in common—their temporary nature, born out of the necessity of the moment. Yet we might also consider infrastructures and protocols that can assist more long-term forms of urban infrastructure and retrofitting towards democratic futures and agonistic assemblies…(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)”.
Book by Mariana Mazzucato: “Our economic system is broken. The climate crisis is accelerating. Inequality is deepening. Public trust is crumbling. Wealth concentrates in fewer hands while governments scramble to fix what markets can’t do, rather than to shape them from the outset.
For too long, economics has treated ‘the good’ – whether public goods or the commons – as merely correcting market or government failures. This economic framing traps us in an endless cycle of being reactive, patching problems rather than proactively building the economy we need.
In The Common Good Economy, Mariana Mazzucato builds on her visionary ideas of the entrepreneurial state and mission-oriented policies to establish a new theory of the common good, one which allows governments and businesses to develop purposeful economic relationships, creating value and building spaces where human flourishing can happen. She argues that how we achieve collective goals – through collective action, participation and reciprocity – matters as much as what those goals are. The book provides a practical ‘common good compass’ to help navigate our economies in a radically different direction.
Full of compelling real-world examples, from governing water to transforming procurement and finance, this is a rigorous reimagining of economics and a manifesto for a future economy that serves people and the planet. It could not be more timely…(More)”.
Article by Jacob Prehn (Worimi), Bronwyn Carlson (Aboriginal), Maggie Walter (Palawa) and Ray Lovett (Wongaibon/Ngiyampaa) and Bobby Maher (Yamatji, Noongar, Kija): “This article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) will not benefit Indigenous peoples equitably unless grounded in Indigenous data sovereignty and Indigenous governance of AI systems. In Australia and comparable nation-states, data ecosystems have long served as instruments of colonial control, determining what knowledges are valued, how people are categorized, and who benefits. As AI systems are built upon these foundations, they risk deepening and automating colonial logics. Indigenous data sovereignty offers a powerful counter framework, asserting the rights of Indigenous peoples to govern the creation, interpretation, and use of data concerning themselves, their communities, and their lands. This article examines how applying Indigenous governance to data and AI systems could alleviate unintended harms and create more equitable benefits within digital technologies. Rather than treating AI as neutral or benevolent, it is positioned as a contested domain where Indigenous resurgence confronts colonial continuity, advancing governance frameworks enabling just, accountable, and equitable futures…(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)”
Report by Carl Miller, Hannah Perry and Flynn Devine: “As large language models (LLMs) become embedded across every stage of our information supply chain, they are creating a new frontier for information warfare. This report explores what happens when AI and geopolitical competition collide, revealing how hostile states can manipulate the information that AI systems retrieve, cite and present to users.
Drawing on new evidence, the report identifies a growing threat: ‘Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) poisoning’ – the deliberate manipulation of online information so that AI models amplify false or misleading narratives. Through a case study of Russian foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), the research demonstrates how these techniques are already influencing the outputs of leading AI services.
The report argues that protecting the UK’s information environment now requires securing AI systems as well as the wider digital ecosystem. It sets out practical recommendations for government, AI companies and civil society to strengthen the UK’s epistemic security, disrupt hostile information operations, and ensure AI develops as a trusted source of knowledge rather than a new vector for foreign interference…(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)”.