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AI for Democracy, or Democracy for AI?

Mozilla Foundation convenes a panel to wrestle with the harder questions about AI and democracy.

Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2026 Time: 5:00 PM CEST / 11:00 AM EDT / 8:00 AM PDT Duration: 1 hour
Description
The dominant story about AI and democracy has been a troubling one: synthetic content flooding our information environments, surveillance tools trained on activists and organizers, platforms optimized for engagement over truth.

Mozilla Foundation rejects this current reality as inevitable, and is working to prove that a different story is possible.

This year, we are funding and supporting technologists building AI systems deliberately designed to strengthen democratic ecosystems, advance mutual understanding, enable institutional accountability, and expand civic participation. In June, we will announce the ten projects joining our Democracy & AI Incubator cohort.

Ahead of that moment, we are convening a panel of experts with sharply different perspectives to wrestle with the harder, underlying questions.
    On our minds are the ones that don’t have easy answers:
    • Are there areas of democratic life — from collective decision-making to legislative accountability — where AI is uniquely well-suited to help, and others where it simply shouldn’t go?
    • Should AI systems intrinsically reflect democratic values such as transparency, accountability, and respect for rule of law? And who decides?
    • Or have we framed this backwards entirely? Is a healthy democracy the precondition for a trustworthy AI ecosystem, not the other way around?
    This is a conversation about what it means to build technology with democratic intent — and whether that’s even enough. Join us.
    Speakers
    Nabiha Syed
    Executive Director, Mozilla Foundation

    Nabiha Syed leads strategic initiatives across programs, products, and grant-making investments for a global movement building a better digital future. Previously, she was CEO of The Markup, and previously led BuzzFeed's libel and newsgathering matters. She sits on the boards of the Scott Trust, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the New Press. She also serves as an advisor to ex/ante, and is a current member of the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. In 2023, Nabiha was awarded the NAACP/Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award for her work.
    Angela Oduor Lungati Executive Director, Ushahidi Angela Oduor Lungati is a Kenyan technologist, community builder, and open-source advocate. As Executive Director of Ushahidi, she leads the global civic-technology platform supporting human rights defenders, election monitors, and crisis responders. In 2024, she was elected chair of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons. Her work guides Ushahidi's integration of emerging technologies into tools that empower citizens.
    Arnau Monterde Director of Democratic Innovation, City of Barcelona Arnau Monterde is Director of Democratic Innovation at the Barcelona City Council, responsible for the decidim.barcelona platform and co-founder of the Decidim platform. He promoted the Canòdrom – Center for Digital and Democratic Innovation, a public hub at the intersection of technology and democracy. His work spans digital rights, free software, technological autonomy, and democratic innovation. He holds a PhD in the Information and Knowledge Society from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
    Woodrow Hartzog Andrew R. Randall Professor of Law, Boston University Professor Hartzog is an internationally recognized scholar in privacy and technology law, with research published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, The New York Times, and The Guardian. He is the co-author of the forthcoming paper, “How AI Destroys Institutions,” which argues that AI is inherently incompatible with the foundational institutions of democratic societies. He holds faculty affiliations at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, Stanford Law School, and Washington University's Cordell Institute.
    Claudia Chwalisz  Founder and CEO, Democracy Next Claudia Chwalisz is the Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext, with over a decade of experience in democratic innovation. She helped design the world's first permanent Citizens' Assemblies in Paris, Ostbelgien, and Brussels, and led the OECD's work on innovative citizen participation from 2018–2022. She is the author of The Populist Signal (2015) and The People's Verdict (2017), and serves on the advisory boards of the UN Democracy Fund, MIT Center for Constructive Communication, and others.
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