AI Accountability Lab
@aial.ie
Trinity College Dublin’s Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab (https://aial.ie/) is founded & led by Dr Abeba Birhane. The lab studies AI technologies & their downstream societal impact with the aim of fostering a greater ecology of AI accountability
We are excited to formally welcome two new outstanding postdoctoral researchers to our lab: Dr @hellinanigatu.bsky.social and Dr Sananda Sahoo aial.ie/people/ 1/
People
Core Team Dr Abeba Birhane(she/her) Assistant Professor, Founder & Principal Investigator of AIAL Dr Abeba Birhane founded and leads the AI Accountability Lab (AIAL) at Trinity College Dublin. She rec...
aial.ie
please share any tools, libraries, or other resources that you find helpful for numerous research tasks
Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · last mo.as genai proliferates, it has become difficult to avoid it. at @aial.ie, we're compiling a list of genai-free tools, libraries & websites to support research across tasks;grammar/spell check, coding/code review, data analysis (esp large scale text classification) & graphing/data visualisation recs?
TODAY! Tune in to the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream to hear @emilymbender.bsky.social, @alexhanna.bsky.social and @savasavasava.myatproto.social discuss how “responsible use” of LLMs isn’t a thing & AI “harm reduction” frameworks in edtech. July 6, noon Pacific twitch.tv/dair_institute
dair_institute - Twitch
Twitch account for The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).
twitch.tv
#FAccT2026 has been a great experience of leaning from, connect with, and socialising with the FAccT community. Huge thanks to the organising committee! #FAccT26
AIAL @ #FAccT2026
Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · last mo.Dick Blankvoort presents work that looks into model providers obligation to provide a public summary of training data for GPAI models under the EU AI Act: tldr small open source model providers are following rules while there's no information to be found on large providers such as openai #FAccT2026
For our final episode of Computer Says Kill, @alixdunn.com sat down with @docmattmoudi.bsky.social from @amnesty.org and @marwasf.bsky.social from @accessnow.org to talk about our path out of AI in warfare.
Computer Says Kill: How To Say No w/ Matt Mahmoudi and Marwa Fatafta
How do we stand up against the human rights violations that exist in the gruesome relationship between the business of AI and war?
themaybe.org
Will you be at FAccT next week? Come hang out with us & learn about our work. We’ll discuss pathways to meaningful accountability, theories of change, & what brings us joy along the way over iconic bagels & TimBits in the park Sat June 27th, 18:00 - 20:00, Jeanne-Mance Park aial.ie/news/facct20...
AI Accountability Lab at FAccT 2026
Members of the AIAL will be at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) in Montreal, presenting our work and hosting a social for the community. Come hang out with the ...
aial.ie
The CCMI bureau visited the AI Accountability Lab research group at Trinity College Dublin, which works on the risks and societal impacts of AI systems 🤝 We thank @abeba.blacksky.app and the @adaptcentre.bsky.social team for their presentation, which was highly insightful and provocative 🖥️
AI-accelerated warfare must stop! Together with @amnesty.org and +200 experts and civil society organizations, we are calling on governments and tech companies to ensure AI does not become a tool for accelerating death and destruction. Read our statement: www.accessnow.org/press-releas...
"AIAL, one of the few independent sources of research into AI’s societal risks, conducts testing that is a model for evaluating systems before they are released to the public." www.macfound.org/press/grante...
Assessing AI’s Service to Humanity
macfound.org
On Sat a well attended screening of doc GHOST IN THE MACHINE examined the roots of #AI offering audiences a critical look at the forces that have shaped the tech's development. Followed by an engaging Q&A w/ @abeba.blacksky.app @aial.ie & host @elaineburke.bsky.social @fortechssakepod.bsky.social
Congratulations to Dr @abeba.blacksky.app on being elected to the AI Act Advisory Forum! Abeba is director of the @aial.ie of @tcddublin.bsky.social & ADAPT. Learn more about the lab: aial.ie
ICYMI: why it's a bad idea for the UK government to give US tech giant Palantir a role at the heart of the state - and why ministers need to take the chance to kick them out of the NHS: www.lbc.co.uk/article/pala...
A firm obsessed with dominance like Palantir shouldn’t be at the centre of our state | LBC
Should we really be handing more and more parts of our public services to Big Tech firms, whose leaders are not particularly keen on democracy? writes Donald Campbell
lbc.co.uk
SCREENING SAT JUNE 6th - Ghost in the Machine w/ Q&A with Dr. @abeba.blacksky.app, Director of @aial.ie @tcddublin.bsky.social and chaired by @elaineburke.bsky.social host of @fortechssakepod.bsky.social TICKETS: ifi.ie/film/ghost-i...
GHOST IN THE MACHINE + Q&A - Irish Film Institute
SCREENING SATURDAY JUNE 6th Valerie Veatch’s gripping documentary exposes the hidden history of AI, not as a neutral system of algorithms, but as a technology shaped by racism, misogyny, eugenics, and...
ifi.ie
so sorry to be missing #EdTech26 (hello to all!) but grateful to @iltasky.bsky.social for livestreaming keynotes ilta.ie/edtech-2026/ this morning's keynote on AI & Education by @abeba.blacksky.app (@aial.ie) was outstanding: core values of education (love, trust, empathy, care) cannot be datafied
Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/
In our conclusion, we stress that industry capture is not just an urgent academic concern but a pressing real-world issue with global consequences. While, gegulators may engage with industry, governance must ultimately protect the public interest, not corporate power. 11/
Civil society orgs and investigative journalists are doing indispensable work: promoting counter narratives and resistance, exposing lobbying and deregulation, documenting harms, advancing strategic litigation... Support them. Fund them. Amplify their work. 10/
We survey and highlight transferable lessons from adjacent movements, namely Big Oil, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. We advocate for supporting grassroots groups, CSOs and independent academics that are doing amazing work to hold Big AI and regulators accountable and to ensure the rule of law. 9/
![Lessons from adjacent movements. Many of the mechanisms of capture used by Big AI, that we have
discussed in this paper, mirror strategies that have historically been applied by similar industries such as
Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and Big Oil. Civil society’s efforts to hold big corporations accountable in these
sectors is ongoing and has been met with significant challenges and has often fallen short of meaningfully
countering corporate power [45, 50, 118]. Yet, there are remain lesson to be learned from these efforts and the
braoder scholarship on corporate capture. For example, the OECD report on preventing policy capture in public
decision-making [85] recommends to (i) level the playing field by engaging diverse stakeholders, (ii) ensure
transparency and access to information, (iii) promote accountability via external control, effective competition,
and regulatory policies, and (iv) define clear institutional codes of conduct, promote cultures of integrity, and
establish appropriate frameworks for risk-management. Similarly, in the context of Big Tobacco, Lee [63] calls for
appropriate separation between public and private interests, binding rules for government-industry interactions
to manage conflicts-of-interests, enforcement of transparency and accountability practices, and safeguarding
academic knowledge production from undue industry influence. A 2024 report [5] further calls for applying
transferable lessons from the US Food and Drug Administration on how to regulate and hold Big AI accountable](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:26hkfmtr7jrchexamh7hk6rz/bafkreic73dnga3yin6bovkbh2s6geovsezduoqulseis4zewvhm7rfmoum)
These conflicts of interest endanger public trust in institutions’ ability to scrutinise corporations and enforce the law while raising serious questions about the growing integration of Big AI infrastructure into state power under the banner of "government efficiency" 8/
Across the US, EU and UK, our findings show regulatory capture isn’t just driven by Big AI - governments and public officials are deeply entangled too. Revolving doors, blurr regulator-industry boundaries & ownership/direct financial stakes in companies are undermining democratic accountability 7/
![Prior work has typically adopted a dichotomous theoretical lens – distinguishing information capture from
influence on policymaking [108], whereas the most recurring mechanisms in our evidence also include the Elusion
of law. These recurring violations and contentious interpretations of antitrust, privacy, copyright and labour
laws call into question the effectiveness of enforcement. Such pressures, along with weakening the mandates
of regulatory agencies, risk the normalisation of a de facto law in which Big AI operates outside the bounds of
regulatory scrutiny. Furthermore, the stochastic nature of the underlying technology–where the technology
cannot be reliably tested–coupled with the economic power of Big AI corporations enables a normalisation of
“algorithmic states of exception” at scale. Defined by McQuillan [71], this indicates the application of algorithms
as the de facto authority in contexts where their behaviour has not been or cannot be tested, creating conditions
akin to martial law. The conjunction of law-flouting practice and technological affordances thus raises urgent
concerns regarding the contemporary integrity of lawmaking institutions over their respective jurisdictions.
Our annotation of narratives employed provide another qualitative avenue for insight into capture strategies,
which can be further studied to understand the causal or system impact of different narratives on discourse,
public conceptions of AI, and knowledge production. Our finding that there is substantial growth over time in the
Discourse & Epistemic Influence (see Figure 2b) indicates that how AI is framed is becoming increasingly important.
The consistent co-occurrence of each D&EI mechanism with approximately one corresponding mechanism from
other categories indicates the significant role that public-facing campaigns play.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:26hkfmtr7jrchexamh7hk6rz/bafkreie4dmfcomofk4degqch4teyxoocdbpszetfysy5hmeyh5id5dvivq)
49 out of the 100 articles we analysed contain narrative(s) that attempt to justify capture: 'Regulation stifles innovation,' 'Red tape,' 'National interest' were amongst the most frequently invoked 6/
Big AI’s most powerful regulatory tool may be narrative capture -> Epistemic & Discourse Influence: getting regulators to adopt industry talking points as common sense. Close behind is Elusion of law: violations and contentious interpretations of antitrust, privacy, copyright and labour laws 5/
Applying the taxonomy to a dataset of 100 articles, specifically published around four critical events between 2023 and 2025 ( the EU AI Act trilogues and the global AI summits in the UK, South Korea and France), we find 249 cases fitting capture patterns. 4/
Through extensive scoping review of grey and academic literature, we first develop our taxonomy of mechanisms related to capture of AI regulation, spanning 5 dimensions: Direct Influence on Policy, Conflicting Involvement, Market Influence, Elusion of Law, & Epistemic & Discourse Influence 3/
We define Big AI “handful companies that develop & mass deploy large-scale AI built on massive datasets collected through vast, centralised infrastructures, which, with increased integration into societal infrastructure, continue to exert outsized epistemic, economic, political & societal influence”
![We use the term ‘Big AI’ to refer to the handful of companies that develop and mass deploy large-scale AI technologies – such as large
pre-trained models – built on massive datasets collected through vast, centralised infrastructures, which, with increased integration into
societal infrastructure, continue to exert outsized epistemic, economic, political, and societal influence. The term ‘Big AI ’ also encapsulates
the structural consolidation of AI technologies by Big Tech as their core value proposition, central to their infrastructure, resources, and
strategic investments [121]. While new entities such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and xAI are included in our definition due to their
significant geo-political influence, ‘Big AI’ also marks the shift of existing Big Tech companies – Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple,
NVIDIA – towards becoming “AI-first” companies, further expanding their unprecedented power and influence across all economic sectors
and aspects of public life.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:26hkfmtr7jrchexamh7hk6rz/bafkreib2yn6sn77re456gpt54bg67exarfi5u7rjykn6eot4uri7ia67aa)
New research led by @tcddublin.bsky.social, TCD SCSS, @aial.ie & ADAPT pinpoints the growing threat posed by the influence #AI companies have over the rule of law, and people’s lives, as well as outlining how society can stem the tide: www.adaptcentre.ie/news-and-eve...
ICCL is hiring an Office & Operations Manger! The office is the heart of our organisation and ensuring it runs smoothly is an essential role. We are looking for someone experienced in operations, finance and governance. If that sounds like you, then apply before the deadline of 5pm on Sunday 31 May
New from @mbrauh.bsky.social !!
Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · 3mo ago"This opacity of both models and evaluation methods stifles the field, already dogged by limitations in AI evaluation practices, and limits progress towards a science of AI evaluation." writes @aial.ie's @mbrauh.bsky.social www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/account...