AI and the Future of Freedom

If you’ve paid even passing attention to media coverage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) you’ve no doubt heard doomsday predictions about killer robots, massive job losses, and even human extinction. While it’s wise to be mindful of the risks of any new technology – and certainly fascinating to debate these scenarios – too little media attention is given to how AI could dramatically improve our lives.

In fact, fear itself can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and stall innovation. Whether you’re a fan or skeptic of the technology, or a mix of both, AI is only going to move forward, not backward. Instead of thinking about how we should regulate or stop AI, we should instead be focused on how we can shape the technology so that it serves our interests and advances the cause of liberty and freedom.

That’s what we’re determined to do at Open the Books. In the coming weeks and through 2026 you’ll be hearing a lot more from us about an initiative we’re calling “AI and the Future of Freedom.” This initiative will feature partnerships, collaborations, events, papers and the development of new tools that will make it easier for you to hold government accountable.

If our founders were alive today, I have no doubt they would be pushing us to use our data, which is the largest dataset of government spending ever assembled, to ensure that technologies like AI strengthen the hand of We the People rather than that of centralized governments. Our founders understood that human history is a forever war between the forces of freedom and tyranny. Every new technology can tilt the scales in either direction.

For most of history, tyrannical centralized governments – monarchs and dictatorships – had the upper hand. Our American experiment is an exception to that trend, and we intend to keep it that way.

Our founders would not be surprised to see governments around the world using AI to conduct surveillance on citizens. We intend to flip the script. Instead of creating a surveillance state, we believe AI can create a surveillance citizenry. We plan to give you the tools you need to track how government is spending your money in real-time.

Aqueduct – AlphaFold for Public Policy

What we’re envisioning is already working with an AI system you may not yet know. While AI tools like ChatGPT are almost a household name, a system called AlphaFold is arguably doing more to demonstrate the power and promise of the technology. In 2024, AlphaFold’s designers won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for massively accelerating the process of protein mapping, which is a critical step in drug development. Understanding how each protein works and how they behave when they’re diseased allows scientists to identify new targets for therapeutics and even customize treatments. Over the past 50 years, biologists mapped about 170,000 proteins. With AlphaFold, they mapped 200 million proteins in one year, a benchmark that would have taken more than 50,000 years to reach with conventional technology. That’s a giant leap forward in the search for new public health innovations.

AlphaFold’s designers, like the designers of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, harnessed AI’s distinct strength: its ability to process huge datasets to do pattern recognition and then pattern prediction.

At a time when our country is struggling to manage crushing debt and deficits, building a tool to do pattern recognition and pattern prediction in government expenditures could stop wasteful, inefficient, and fraudulent spending before it happens while building support for things like essential infrastructure that can have that can have a positive multiplier effect.

We describe our vision as “Aqueduct.” Just as the Roman aqueduct changed civilization by bringing clean water to urban areas, bringing clean data to We the People can rejuvenate our parched public square and disrupt the cycle of mindless polarization, tribalism, and demagoguery that is paralyzing the body politic.

This process won’t happen automatically, nor will it move in a straight line. AI may well be in its frothy expectation phase, not unlike the “dot-com bubble” which burst in the early 2000s. But time proved that the dot-com revolution was for real. In fact, that revolution helped create Open the Books. In 2006, when I was working for U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, we teamed up with U.S. Senator Barack Obama on a landmark transparency bill that put all federal spending online. Twenty years ago, we looked over the horizon and dreamed of an ecosystem of organizations and citizens who would use the data in ways we couldn’t yet imagine. Adam Andrzejewski, the late co-founder of Open the Books, made that dream a reality when he expanded our vision by capturing not just federal spending, but state and local spending as well.

As we look over the horizon in 2025, we believe our dataset and other datasets can help teach and train an AI tool like Aqueduct to shed light on questions that have vexed citizens, policymakers, and philosophers for all of recorded history. New tools won’t end debate, but they can make debate smarter and more effective, and our society more just.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has said AI is “more profound than electricity or fire.”

By working to shape the technology we can help ensure that fire is not concentrated in the hands of the powerful few but can be placed in the hands – and hearts and minds – of every American citizen who longs to be free.