• The UK parliamentary report “Rewiring the state: Delivering digital government” examines the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence, calling for stronger governance, improved public sector capability, clearer regulation, and greater investment in AI skills, infrastructure, and innovation.

• The OECD’s Digital Government Outlook 2026 reviews how governments are using digital technologies to improve public services and build more citizen-centred, data-driven administrations. The UK country profile highlights the UK’s progress in digital government while identifying opportunities to strengthen interoperability, digital inclusion, data sharing, and public sector innovation.

• The World Economic Forum’s AI Playbook for Financial Services provides practical guidance for financial institutions on adopting AI responsibly while improving productivity, customer services, governance, and risk management.

• The UK’s Digital Standards Strategy 2026–2030 sets out a roadmap for strengthening digital standards to support innovation, improve interoperability, enhance cyber resilience, and promote international collaboration.

• The World Economic Forum’s report explores how AI is supporting social innovation across Asia, highlighting practical applications that address challenges in healthcare, education, sustainability, and public service delivery.

• The OECD’s report on AI and skills examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping labour markets and education, outlining the skills needed for an AI-enabled economy and the policies required to support workforce transitions.

• The UK government’s Digital and Technologies Sector Plan Year One Update reviews progress in strengthening the digital economy through investments in AI, semiconductors, digital infrastructure, research, and technology businesses.

• The WEF’s report presents a human-led AI framework for Asia, encouraging governments and organisations to adopt AI in ways that prioritise human capabilities, inclusion, and long-term economic transformation.

• The UK government has published summaries of AI Champions’ adoption plans, showcasing how organisations across multiple sectors intend to accelerate responsible AI adoption, improve productivity, and encourage innovation.

• Ofcom’s Growth Goals 2026–2027 set out how the regulator will support economic growth by promoting investment, competition, innovation, digital connectivity, and effective implementation of online safety regulation.

• The UK Information Commissioner’s Office has published findings from audits of education technology providers, identifying improvements needed in data protection, transparency, and children’s privacy practices.

• Anthropic has released new research exploring methods for evaluating advanced AI systems, contributing to ongoing efforts to improve AI safety, reliability, transparency, and responsible model development.

• The UK’s Digital and Technologies Sector Innovation Statistics provide new insights into research, development, innovation, and business activity across the country’s growing digital technology sector.

• Anthropic’s Public Record survey reveals that Americans are broadly hopeful about AI’s potential to benefit society but harbour significant concerns about job displacement and corporate accountability, with widespread support for government regulation to ensure AI development prioritises safety and protects the public interest.

• The OECD’s Public Governance Review of Ukraine examines reforms aimed at strengthening public institutions, governance capacity, transparency, and resilience as part of the country’s long-term recovery and modernisation.

• The UK’s AI Hardware Plan outlines long-term investments in computing infrastructure, advanced chips, and AI hardware capabilities to strengthen national research capacity and support frontier AI development.

• The World Bank’s Cloud and Data Center Regulation Rapid Assessment Tool provides countries with a framework to assess and reform their regulatory environments to enable cloud adoption and support AI and digital transformation.

• The OECD’s Digital Government Scan of Slovenia assesses the country’s digital transformation efforts, offering recommendations to strengthen digital public services, data governance, interoperability, and citizen engagement.

• The Lisbon Council’s new policy brief argues that energy communities scale through low-friction digital services and interoperable data infrastructure rather than enthusiasm alone, making participation more accessible to vulnerable populations.

• The UK’s new AI Economics Institute aims to rigorously assess AI’s economic impacts and provide evidence-based guidance to policymakers on harnessing AI’s potential whilst managing labour market and economic disruption.

Articles:

• “LifeSciBench: Evaluating Language Models on Realistic, Expert-Level Tasks in the Life Sciences” introduces a benchmark of 750 expert-designed biology and life science tasks that assess whether language models can handle realistic research workflows, finding that even frontier models perform well below expert-level expectations and that many tasks remain difficult or unsolved, indicating significant room for improvement in scientific reasoning and operational decision-making in biology.

• “The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex” analyses large-scale usage data from OpenAI’s Codex tool and shows rapid growth in agentic AI adoption, with usage increasing more than fivefold in early 2026, shifting beyond developers into organisations, and increasingly reshaping workflows as users manage multiple AI agents, handle more complex tasks, and generate substantially higher output across roles such as legal work and research.

• “The road to sustainable development in cities: Can digital infrastructure improve energy efficiency?” finds that digital infrastructure can significantly improve urban energy efficiency by enabling green technological innovation, optimising resource allocation, and supporting industrial upgrading, although its effects vary by city characteristics and are subject to threshold effects.

• “The mediating role of institutional quality in the relationship between digital infrastructure and exchange rate management efficiency in Sub-Saharan Africa” highlights that digital infrastructure improves exchange rate management efficiency partly through strengthening institutional quality (accounting for around 34% of the effect), and that its impact becomes significant only above a minimum institutional quality threshold, suggesting digital investment needs to be accompanied by institutional reforms to be effective.

• “Does open government data policy mitigate institutional herding? Evidence from China” finds that open government data policies reduce institutional herding by lowering information asymmetry and improving market transparency through higher liquidity and analyst attention, with stronger effects in less developed regions, weaker digital infrastructure contexts, and among pressure-sensitive institutional investors.

• “Data sovereignty, digital maturity, stakeholder engagement, public policy formulation quality, and trust in Palestinian e-government: Evidence from X-road using PLS-SEM-ANN” highlights that digital maturity and data sovereignty positively shape the quality of public policy formulation and, in turn, increase trust in e-government systems, while stakeholder engagement does not show a significant effect in this context, suggesting that governance and technical capabilities play a more critical role than participatory processes in this setting.

• “An open and scalable data architecture for real-time sustainability intelligence” proposes a modular data infrastructure combining batch and streaming analytics to integrate heterogeneous sustainability datasets and enable near real-time monitoring of SDG indicators, demonstrating scalable performance for continuous environmental and sustainability intelligence.

• “To model human linguistic prediction, make LLMs less superhuman” argues that while large language models are highly effective at predicting next words, their prediction abilities now exceed human performance, making them less suitable as models of human language processing, and suggests that improving alignment with human cognition will require adjusting model architectures, memory mechanisms, and experimental benchmarks.

• “Conversational AI as a catalyst for informal learning: An empirical large-scale study on LLM use in everyday learning” reports that large language models are widely adopted for informal learning, with most surveyed users integrating them into daily learning routines, particularly young, digitally engaged adults, while also identifying distinct user types and highlighting tensions around trust, privacy, and learning behaviours.

• “The GCC as a Regional Operating System: Differentiated Sovereignty and the Future of Gulf Regionalism to 2030” by Mohammed Alotaibi – DSA Cambridge Fellow, reframes Gulf Cooperation Council regionalism as a shared strategic “operating system” shaped by interdependence in security, energy, logistics, and digital infrastructure, arguing that effective governance increasingly depends on functionally differentiated cooperation—such as shared security and interoperable systems—rather than deeper political integration.

   

Blogs:

• A new commentary explores how to communicate about artificial intelligence in ways that are accurate, balanced, and constructive, encouraging more informed public conversations while avoiding hype and fear-driven narratives.

• Sir Geoff Mulgan examines whether traditional academic disciplines are equipped to address the complex societal challenges created by AI and other emerging technologies, arguing for greater interdisciplinary collaboration.

• Dr Rachel Adams reflects on the importance of recognising positive developments in AI governance alongside legitimate concerns, advocating for a more balanced discussion of responsible AI progress.

• UK Research and Innovation’s AHRC Forward Look outlines future research priorities, highlighting opportunities to strengthen interdisciplinary work across AI, digital technologies, culture, and the humanities.

• The OECD explores how AI can contribute to more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable agri-food systems by improving productivity, strengthening climate resilience, and supporting evidence-based agricultural policymaking.

• GovInsider examines how the role of the private sector is evolving as governments adopt agentic AI systems, highlighting new forms of collaboration, procurement, and public-private partnerships.

• A new analysis by Prof Alan Penn, argues that strengthening AI capability within the UK civil service will require greater technical expertise, institutional capacity, and long-term investment in digital leadership.

• Rest of World explores why some American users are increasingly choosing Chinese AI models, highlighting factors such as performance, accessibility, pricing, and the growing global competition in generative AI.

• This blog piece examines how Chinese AI researcher Tiezhen Wang views the growing importance of open-source AI, arguing that open models will play a significant role in global AI competition and innovation.

• Rest of World analyses how investment from Gulf states could shape the future of AI infrastructure and major technology companies, including the potential financing of a future SpaceX public offering.

• The World Economic Forum explores how AI can strengthen the resilience and sustainability of energy systems by improving grid management, accelerating renewable integration, and increasing operational efficiency.

• GovInsider highlights Estonia’s experience building an agile cybersecurity coalition during wartime, demonstrating how strong public-private cooperation and international partnerships can enhance national cyber resilience.

• The WEF examines the governance challenges that could emerge as artificial general intelligence develops, calling for stronger international cooperation, institutional preparedness, and responsible AI oversight.

• A new analysis explores how courts across the Asia-Pacific region are introducing AI while maintaining human oversight in judicial decision-making and safeguarding fairness and public trust.

• The UK Government Digital Service has published an update from its Responsible AI Advisory Panel, outlining ongoing work to strengthen governance, share best practices, and support the safe and responsible adoption of AI across government.

• Open call for proposals, Digital Europe Programme

• Pro-Worker AI Adoption Prize, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

• Apply AI Startup Award, The European Commission’s AI Office

• Call for Experts to join the RAISE High-Level Academic Advisory Board, The European Commission

• OpenAI Economic Research Exchange, Open AI

• Innovation Fellowships 2026-27 – Route B: Policy-led, The British Academy

• Kluz Prize for PeaceTech 2026, The Kluz Prize for PeaceTech