Comment by Micah Weinberg

Public funding bodies and philanthropic intermediaries, whose investment in “AI for democracy” has to date been modest and fragmented, have a critical role to play in directing research investment toward the development of “deliberation-native” AI tools whose core optimization targets are defined by democratic-process values. This includes support for policy-led, technology enabled innovations that support those in the democracy space to develop internal technical capacity and external partnerships that bring technical ability to the organizations best positioned to monitor and evaluate deliberation processes. Funders should prioritize multi-year support for open-source deliberation infrastructure and require that grantees adopt deliberative quality benchmarks as a condition of funding.