Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing from empirical research on changing AI governance in the US in 2025, this presentation proposes a modality of critical AI studies that attends symmetrically to the coproduction of AI and democracy, by treating both technoscience and democracy as contingent and constructed sites of inquiry.

Paper long abstract

The return of Trump to the presidency in January 2025 brought a pronounced shift in U.S. AI policy, discourse, and corporate strategy. Executive orders dismantled Biden-era AI safety frameworks, mass firings hollowed out public expertise and institutions, and the administration reframed its posture — in JD Vance's terms — from "AI safety" to "AI opportunity." These moves were presented not as deregulation but as liberation: the triumph of democracy over "woke" elite ideology. The concomitant intensification of entanglements between the tech sector and the US government has been met with alarm from civil society and STS scholars, with warnings of technofascism and tech oligarchy.

This paper takes this political moment (empirically grounded in interviews, executive orders, public discourse, and legal texts) as an entry point for reflecting on what "critical" means in Critical AI Studies. Despite the shocking nature of the sharp turn in U.S. science policy, the essential groundwork for the emergent oligarchic relationships and abusive applications of AI was laid long before 2025. Attending to continuity and disjuncture in the construction of both democracy and technological development is key for understanding how science and technology policy is changing in the U.S. and globally, and how AI development and democratic politics are coproduced.

A Critical AI studies agenda might accordingly attend symmetrically to the coproduction of AI with democracy and include interrogations of how more interventionist STS approaches can help to propagate novel and robust democratic mechanisms that extend beyond the “lab” (or the startup).