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)”.

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)”.