The Policy Leadership Initiative invites you to a Forum on AI Openness & Equity on Tuesday, 14 October. This online event will be a timely moment for policy practitioners, researchers, and advocates to collectively examine tensions and opportunities, surface shared strategies, and shape narratives that put justice, accountability, and the public good at the heart of AI governance.

What would it mean to write AI policy that empowers diverse communities, respects planetary boundaries, and truly serves the public benefit? Our cohort of diverse policy leaders came together across disciplines to share, challenge, and co-create. Here are some of the key takeaways and learnings from our journey so far.

In our sixth AI Openness & Equity Policy Leadership Cohort session, we were joined by security expert Bruce Schneier to unpack the intersection between AI openness and security. Our conversations centered on questions including: What does “security” in the AI context actually mean? Does openness make AI systems more or less secure? Can AI be designed in line with democratic values, and if so, how? Read on for our key reflections and takeaways.

In our fourth AI Openness & Equity Policy Leadership Cohort session, Michelle Thorne from the Green Web Foundation joined us as we explored climate justice in the context of AI. Specifically, our discussion centers around the question: how does AI intersect with climate justice, and what can it mean for public interest technology? Read more for our key reflections.

In our third AI Openness & Equity Policy Leadership Cohort session, we dove deeper into a tough but timely question: how do we design AI that actually serves the public - not just in theory, but in practice? Alek Tarkowski and Zuzanna Warso from the Open Future Foundation joined us for this session, and helped us unpack what “Public AI” means in today’s (hypey) AI landscape.

This is our first in a series of blog posts sharing reflections and learnings from the Openness and Equity Policy Leadership Cohort. In this session, we were joined by Udbhav Tiwari from the Signal Foundation to explore a foundational question: What does “openness” mean in the age of AI, and how can the values of open-source guide AI systems to serve the public good?

In this cohort launched in partnership with Mozilla, we've assembled a diverse mix of practitioners, researchers, and academics to explore what openness and equity can and should mean in AI, and how they can be levers for greater accountability, inclusion, and public interest development across Europe and beyond.

Since launching the Policy Leadership Initiative, we have interviewed over 100 individuals in the policy field. We wanted to hear what practitioners had to say about leadership, policy work, power-sharing, and a range of other topics. In this new blog series, we will share some highlights from these interviews, which fundamentally shaped the Policy Leadership Initiative.

In trying to mediate the consequences of Big Tech and EU law on daily life, the Policy Leadership Initiative advocates for the inclusion of voices from those disproportionately affected and/or harmed by technology. But what do we actually mean by leadership?