Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities.
We have just published the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform Politics, Government, and Citizenship. In it, we take a clear-eyed view of how AI is undermining confidence in our information ecosystem, how the use of biased AI can harm constituents of democracies and how elected officials with authoritarian tendencies can use it to consolidate power. But we also give positive examples of how AI is transforming democratic governance and politics for the better.
Here are four such stories unfolding right now around the world, showing how AI is being used by some to make democracy better, stronger, and more responsive to people.
Japan
Last year, then 33-year-old engineer Takahiro Anno was a fringe candidate for governor of Tokyo. Running as an independent candidate, he ended up coming in fifth in a crowded field of 56largely thanks to the unprecedented use of an authorized AI avatar. That avatar answered 8,600 questions from voters on a 17-day continuous YouTube livestream and garnered the attention of campaign innovators worldwide.
Two months ago, Anno-san was elected to Japan’s upper legislative chamber, again leveraging the power of AI to engage constituents–this time answering more than 20,000 questions. His new party, Team Mirai, is also an AI-enabled civic technology shop, producing software aimed at making governance better and more participatory. The party is leveraging its share of Japan’s public funding for political parties to build the Mirai Assembly app, enabling constituents to express opinions on and ask questions about bills in the legislature, and to organize those expressions using AI. The party promises that its members will direct their questioning in committee hearings based on public input.
Brazil
Brazil is notoriously litigiouswith even more lawyers per capita than the US. The courts are chronically overwhelmed with cases and the resultant backlog costs the government billions to process. Estimates are that the Brazilian federal government spends about 1.6% of GDP per year operating the courts and another 2.5% to 3% of GDP issuing court-ordered payments from lawsuits the government has lost.
Since at least 2019, the Brazilian government has aggressively adopted AI to automate procedures throughout its judiciary. AI is not making judicial decisions, but aiding in distributing caseloads, performing legal research, transcribing hearings, identifying duplicative filings, preparing initial orders for signature and clustering similar cases for joint consideration: all things to make the judiciary system work more efficiently. And the results are significant; Brazil’s federal supreme court backlog, for example, dropped in 2025 to its lowest levels in 33 years.
While it seems clear that the courts are realizing efficiency benefits from leveraging AI, there is a postscript to the courts’ AI implementation project over the past five-plus years: the litigators are using these tools, too. Lawyers are using AI assistance to file cases in Brazilian courts at an unprecedented ratewith new cases growing by nearly 40% in volume over the past five years.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing for Brazilian litigators to regain the upper hand in this arms race. It has been argued that litigation, particularly against the government, is a vital form of civic participationessential to the self-governance function of democracy. Other democracies’ court systems should study and learn from Brazil’s experience and seek to use technology to maximize the bandwidth and liquidity of the courts to process litigation.
Germany
Now, we move to Europe and innovations in informing voters. Since 2002, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education has operated a non-partisan voting guide called Wahl-o-Mat. Officials convene an editorial team of 24 young voters (under 26 and selected for diversity) with experts from science and education to develop a slate of 80 questions. The questions are put to all registered German political parties. The responses are narrowed down to 38 key topics and then published online in a quiz format that voters can use to identify the party whose platform they most identify with.
In the past two years, outside groups have been innovating alternatives to the official Wahl-o-Mat guide that leverage AI. First came Optionala product of the German AI company AIUI. Second, students at the Technical University of Munich deployed an interactive AI system called Wahl.chat. This tool was used by more than 150,000 people within the first four months. In both cases, instead of having to read static webpages about the positions of various political parties, citizens can engage in an interactive conversation with an AI system to more easily get the same information contextualized to their individual interests and questions.
However, German researchers studying the reliability of such AI tools ahead of the 2025 German federal election raised significant concerns about bias and “hallucinations” – AI tools making up false information. Acknowledging the potential of the technology to increase voter informedness and party transparency, the researchers recommended adopting scientific evaluations comparable to those used in the Agency for Civic Education’s official tool to improve and institutionalize the technology.
United States
Finally, the US – in particular, California, home to CalMattersa non-profit, nonpartisan news organization. Since 2023, its Digital Democracy project has been collecting every public utterance of California elected officials – every floor speech, comment made in committee and social media post, along with their voting records, legislation, and campaign contributions – and making all that information available in a free online platform.
CalMatters this year launched a new feature that takes this kind of civic watchdog function a big step further. Its AI Tip Sheets feature uses AI to search through all of this data, looking for anomalies, such as a change in voting position tied to a large campaign contribution. These anomalies appear on a webpage that journalists can access to give them story ideas and a source of data and analysis to drive further reporting.
This is not AI replacing human journalists; it is a civic watchdog organization using technology to feed evidence-based insights to human reporters. And it’s no coincidence that this innovation arose from a new kind of media institution – a non-profit news agency. As the watchdog function of the fourth estate continues to be degraded by the decline of newspapers’ business models, this kind of technological support is a valuable contribution to help a reduced number of human journalists retain something of the scope of action and impact our democracy relies on them for.
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These are just four of many stories from around the globe of AI helping to make democracy stronger. The common thread is that the technology is distributing rather than concentrating power. In all four cases, it is being used to assist people performing their democratic tasks – politics in Japan, litigation in Brazil, voting in Germany and watchdog journalism in California – rather than replacing them.
In none of these cases is the AI doing something that humans can’t perfectly competently do. But in all of these cases, we don’t have enough available humans to do the jobs on their own. A sufficiently trustworthy AI can fill in gaps: amplify the power of civil servants and citizens, improve efficiency, and facilitate engagement between government and the public.
One of the barriers towards realizing this vision more broadly is the AI market itself. The core technologies are largely being created and marketed by US tech giants. We don’t know the details of their development: on what material they were trained, what guardrails are designed to shape their behavior, what biases and values are encoded into their systems. And, even worse, we don’t get a say in the choices associated with those details or how they should change over time. In many cases, it’s an unacceptable risk to use these for-profit, proprietary AI systems in democratic contexts.
To address that, we have long advocated for the development of “public AI”: models and AI systems that are developed under democratic control and deployed for public benefit, not sold by corporations to benefit their shareholders. The movement for this is growing worldwide.
Switzerland has recently released the world’s most powerful and fully realized public AI model. It’s called Openand it was developed jointly by the Swiss government and the university ETH Zurich. The government has made it entirely open source –open data, open code, open weights – and free for anyone to use. No illegally acquired copyrighted works were used in its training. It doesn’t exploit poorly paid human laborers from the global south. Its performance is about where the large corporate giants were a year ago, which is more than good enough for many applications. And it demonstrates that it’s not necessary to spend trillions of dollars creating these models. Apertus takes a huge step forward to realizing the vision of an alternative to big tech–controlled corporate AI.
AI technology is not without its costs and risks, and we are not here to minimize them. But the technology has significant benefits as well.
AI is inherently power-enhancing, and it can magnify what the humans behind it want to do. It can enhance authoritarianism as easily as it can enhance democracy. It’s up to us to steer the technology in that better direction. If more citizen watchdogs and litigators use AI to amplify their power to oversee government and hold it accountable, if more political parties and election administrators use it to engage meaningfully with and inform voters and if more governments provide democratic alternatives to big tech’s AI offerings, society will be better off.
What’s giving me hope now
Nathan: I am excited to see examples of people taking the technology into their own hands to fight for what they believe in. In addition to the above, we see US political campaigners using AI to make door-to-door canvassing more effective, Brazilian civic technologists using data to generate oversight of local government, and countless other examples around the world.
Bruce: There is a real chance that AI technology will distribute power. Right now it’s concentrating power, because the cost to build these frontier models is enormous. But that cost is dropping dramaticallyand the need for smaller and more nimble models is growing. One of the most important things we can do is to break the tech monopolies, and a more distributed AI ecosystem might just help with that.
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Nathan E Sanders is a data scientist affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center of Harvard University and co-author, with Bruce Schneier, of the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Bruce Schneier is a security technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University
