AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond – Matthew Botvinick, MD, JD, Ph.D., and Andrew Sorota

American democracy is under strain just as artificial intelligence is remaking public life, yet the two stories are rarely told together. In AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond, AI researcher and neuroscientist Matthew Botvinick, MD, JD, Ph.D., connects them, arguing that AI will press hardest on the points where democracy has always been fragile.

In the near term, Botvinick sees a triple threat. Automation-driven job loss breeds the economic insecurity that makes authoritarian appeals attractive. Security crises invite governments to stretch emergency powers. And AI-enabled surveillance raises constitutional questions, not just personal privacy concerns. Over the longer term, if AI replaces most human labor, governments could stop depending on their citizens for revenue, a condition in which democracy rarely survives.

He also lays out a response: structural reforms to shore up democratic institutions now, and deeper change later, including using AI itself to bring ordinary citizens more fully into self-government. And he insists the AI industry be held accountable, since without democracy and the rule of law there can be no genuine AI safety.

Botvinick is a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, where he leads research on AI and the rule of law, a senior fellow at Yale Law School, and formerly senior director of research at Google DeepMind. He will be in conversation with Andrew Sorota, head of research at the Office of Eric Schmidt and is pursuing a Ph.D. in political theory at Yale.

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