Tech & Democracy Weekly Roundup [9/4/25]

News, articles, opportunities, & important info from this week in Tech & Democracy

Welcome to our first-ever ‘Tech & Democracy Weekly Roundup’ here at The Renovator. Sourced from the GETTING-Plurality Research Network via Danielle Allen’s Lab for Democracy Renovation, housed in the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, this end-of-week roundup will feature curated links keeping you up to date on all important news, research, and opportunities at the intersection of tech and democracy. You can toggle your subscription to this Tech & Democracy section, as well as all our other Renovator sections, at https://therenovator.substack.com/account. Of all our sections, this one moves the fastest, with rapid consequences for the future of democracy; we’ll keep you at the cutting edge. This week’s Roundup is full of extra content from the summer! Enjoy :)

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Highlights:

• TODAY: September 4 at 7PM ET Live Event, ‘Should the US Be Ruled By A CEO Dictator?’ Glen Weyl and Curtis Yarvin Debate

• Join this hands-on workshop series! Reboot Democracy: Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era InnovateUS series hosted by The Allen Lab & The GovLab

• White House AI Action Plan

• The philosophical inspiration for GETTING-Plurality— “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy” is a book by Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and a decentralized cohort of major thinkers; Danielle Allen highly recommends. It’s free to download online!

• Utah Digital Choice Act: Reshaping Social Media by Sarah Hubbard (Sarah curates these roundups for GETTING-Plurality! Thanks Sarah!)

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News:

• How the NYPD’s Facial Recognition Tool Landed the Wrong Man in Jail

• Google Antitrust Case Ruling

  • Google Dodges Breakup In Landmark Antitrust Ruling Over Its Search Engine

  • Judge Orders Google to Share Search Results to Help Resolve Monopoly

• Lawsuit Against OpenAI Over Teen’s Suicide

  • This is the latest in growing concerns over the use of chat bots, related: Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info

  • Recent report and survey that finds that over a third of children are talking to an AI chatbot like a friend

  • Common Sense Media on Social AI Companions

  • How people use Claude for companionship (Anthropic)

• Google and pollster Scott Rasmussen will use AI to survey American’s political views

• DemocracyNext paper: Five dimensions of scaling democratic deliberation: With and beyond AI

• Anthropic’s Threat Intelligence Report

• American Association of Political Consultants released a bipartisan political AI adoption report in June

• Can AI Mediation Improve Democratic Deliberation? (Essay from Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute)

• Two recent empirical econ working papers about early impacts of AI in the labor market

  • Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence (Stanford Digital Economy Lab)

  • Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Résumé and Job Posting Data

• Characterizing AI Agents for Alignment and Governance

• We need a new ethics for a world of AI agents (DeepMind)

• AI and Democratic Publics by Henry Farrell and Hahrie Han

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Events and opportunities:

• 2026 Tech Policy Press Fellowship Program applications due October 15

• Sept 16 9AM ET - People Powered event on AI for Digital Democracy

• Princeton CITP launches Technology Fellows Program, applications due by Oct 15

• Congressional Hackathon Sept 17

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Papers from the GETTING-Plurality network this summer:

• Mass. must resist Congress’s proposed moratorium on state AI regulation by Alex Pascal & Nathan Sanders

• Cyberattacks shake voters’ trust in elections, regardless of party by Bruce Schneier

• The Age of Integrity by Bruce Schneier

• A New Age of Trillionaire Philanthropy Is Coming. Democracies Should Be Wary. by Jeremy McKey

• AI-Enhanced Deliberative Democracy and the Future of Collective Will by Manon Revel and Theophile Penigaud

• The AI Agents of Tomorrow Need Data Integrity by Bruce Schneier

• Democratic AI is Possible. The Democracy Levels Framework Shows How It Might Work by Luke, Aviv, et al.