Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)

Oct 23, 2025

Nathan E. Sanders, a data scientist with a background in astrophysics and affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center, teams up with security technologist Bruce Schneier to explore AI's transformative role in democracy. They delve into how AI reshapes voter interactions and legislative processes while examining its biases and implications for power dynamics. By contrasting U.S. and EU regulatory approaches, they reveal how AI can enhance public governance, with a focus on practical applications for local governments. Ultimately, they advocate for balanced oversight to ensure AI serves the public interest.

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INSIGHT

AI Is Already Part Of Government Workflows

AI is already embedded across nearly every government agency, not just a future concern.
France built a legislative AI (Lama Amendment) to help staff summarize and assess amendments, showing practical assistive uses.

ANECDOTE

Civic Tech Summarizes Thousands Of Bills

Nathan described Maple, a Massachusetts civic platform using AI to summarize every legislative bill in plain language.
The tool makes 8,000 bills per session accessible when human summaries would be impractical.

INSIGHT

AI Could Make Voting More Continuous

AI could let citizens iterate on preferences more frequently than rare ballot initiatives.
Personalized AI aides might represent individual views across many policy choices, changing democratic participation.

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AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how.
AI’s impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated misinformation. Everywhere it will be used, it will create risks and opportunities to shake up long-standing power structures.
In this highly readable and advisedly optimistic book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press, 2025), security technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders cut through the AI hype and examine the myriad ways that AI is transforming every aspect of democracy—for both good and ill.
The authors describe how the sophistication of AI will fulfill demands from lawmakers for more complex legislation, reducing deference to the executive branch and altering the balance of power between lawmakers and administrators. They show how the scale and scope of AI is enhancing civil servants’ ability to shape private-sector behavior, automating either the enforcement or neglect of industry regulations. They also explain how both lawyers and judges will leverage the speed of AI, upending how we think about law enforcement, litigation, and dispute resolution.
Whether these outcomes enhance or degrade democracy depends on how we shape the development and use of AI technologies. Powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence, and AIs built by corporations don’t deliver the fairness and trust required by democratic governance. But, steered in the right direction, AI’s broad capabilities can augment democratic processes and help citizens build consensus, express their voice, and shake up long-standing power structures.
Democracy is facing new challenges worldwide, and AI has become a part of that. It can inform, empower, and engage citizens. It can also disinform, disempower, and disengage them. The choice is up to us. Schneier and Sanders blaze the path forward, showing us how we can use AI to make democracy stronger and more participatory.

Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist focused on making policymaking more participatory. His research spans machine learning, astrophysics, public health, environmental justice, and more. He has served in fellowships at the Massachusetts legislature and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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