Advancing Science- and Evidence-based AI Policy
Abstract
AI policy should advance AI innovation by ensuring that its potential benefits are responsibly realized and widely shared. To achieve this, AI policymaking should place a premium on evidence: Scientific understanding and systematic analysis should inform policy, and policy should accelerate evidence generation. But policy outcomes reflect institutional constraints, political dynamics, electoral pressures, stakeholder interests, media environment, economic considerations, cultural contexts, and leadership perspectives. Adding to this complexity is the reality that the broad reach of AI may mean that evidence and policy are misaligned: Although some evidence and policy squarely address AI, much more partially intersects with AI. Well-designed policy should integrate evidence that reflects scientific understanding rather than hype. An increasing number of efforts address this problem by often either (i) contributing research into the risks of AI and their effective mitigation or (ii) advocating for policy to address these risks. This paper tackles the hard problem of how to optimize the relationship between evidence and policy to address the opportunities and challenges of increasingly powerful AI.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.02748,
title = {Advancing Science- and Evidence-based AI Policy},
author = {Rishi Bommasani and Sanjeev Arora and Jennifer Chayes and Yejin Choi and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Li Fei-Fei and Daniel E. Ho and Dan Jurafsky and Sanmi Koyejo and Hima Lakkaraju and Arvind Narayanan and Alondra Nelson and Emma Pierson and Joelle Pineau and Scott Singer and Gaël Varoquaux and Suresh Venkatasubramanian and Ion Stoica and Percy Liang and Dawn Song},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02748},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science on July 31, 2025