# The Race: Building Democracy in the Age of AI > Tracking whether AI concentrates power or disperses democratic capacity. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages - [July 2026 8-Lane Scoreboard Review](https://www.theraceai.org/8-lane-scoreboard-review.md) - Lane 01 - Governance and Regulation * Direction of power: Mixed-contested * Window status: Narrowing * Confidence: Medium-high * Transparency / contestability overlay: Mixed * Current read: July produced some of the month’s strongest public-governance gains, but the institutional politics of AI reg… - [About Mark Howard and The Race](https://www.theraceai.org/about-author.md) - The Race: Building Democracy in the Age of AI is an independent research and writing project by Mark Howard. It examines how artificial intelligence is changing the distribution of power—and whether democratic institutions, communities, workers, and smaller organizations will retain the capacity to… - [How The Race Works](https://www.theraceai.org/framework.md) - The Race is not intended to be a catalogue of everything happening in artificial intelligence. It is a way of judging what important developments mean for the distribution of power. A new model, law, data center, workplace system, or public investment may be significant for many reasons. The questi… - [The Race](https://www.theraceai.org/home.md) - Building Democracy in the Age of AI AI is changing who has power. It can give workers, communities, public institutions, and smaller organizations new capacity to solve problems and act for themselves. It can also concentrate control in dominant companies, governments, security institutions, and te… - [How the Scoreboard Works](https://www.theraceai.org/scoreboard-methodology.md) - The Scoreboard tracks two related questions: 1. Is artificial intelligence concentrating power or dispersing meaningful capacity? 2. Are the choices shaping that outcome still open to challenge? The answers are rarely simple. A development can widen access while creating a new dependency. A regulat… - [The Scoreboard](https://www.theraceai.org/scoreboard.md) - The Scoreboard tracks whether artificial intelligence is concentrating power or dispersing meaningful capacity—and whether the choices shaping that outcome remain open to challenge. It follows eight connected lanes. The judgment is not based on any one announcement or event. It comes from the patte… - [Series](https://www.theraceai.org/series.md) - Browse connected arguments in their intended reading order. - [The Eight Lanes](https://www.theraceai.org/the-eight-lanes.md) - AI is changing power through laws, national strategy, infrastructure, platforms, public institutions, and the organization of work. The Race follows those changes through eight connected lanes. The lanes are not separate races. They are different ways of asking the same questions: Who gains capacit… ## Posts - [Data Centers Are Changing the Government Economic Development Bargain](https://www.theraceai.org/data-centers-are-changing-the-government-economic-development-bargain.md) - AI-scale data centers are changing the economic development bargain. As power, land, water, permitting and speed-to-market become scarce, governments are gaining leverage to demand tougher terms, greater public benefits and fewer subsidies. - [How Municipal Governments Can Get What They Need from AI](https://www.theraceai.org/how-municipal-governments-can-get-what-they-need-from-ai.md) - Municipal governments do not need to match AI vendors alone. By connecting existing professional networks, sharing lessons faster, and building a stronger vendor feedback loop, they can gain scale without giving up local authority. - [This Week: Action, But In Different Directions](https://www.theraceai.org/this-week-action-but-in-different-directions.md) - The most important pattern this week is the simultaneous movement in opposite directions. Government is becoming a more consequential gatekeeper over frontier-model release and hyperscale infrastructure, while open weights and on-device models are making technical alternatives more plausible—and th… - [The Next AI Fight Is Over the Right to Leave](https://www.theraceai.org/the-next-ai-fight-is-over-the-right-to-leave.md) - As AI systems learn our preferences, projects, and workflows, portability will determine whether model choice becomes customer power. - [Private Infrastructure, Public Permission](https://www.theraceai.org/private-infrastructure-public-permission.md) - The federal government is becoming the gatekeeper for a privately owned AI infrastructure system. That combination concentrates power—and creates structural incentives for corruption. - [What Happened In The Race In July?](https://www.theraceai.org/what-happened-in-the-race-in-july.md) - This week's note starts with the monthly update for July - where we try to gather up all the events we've studied during the month and tell you where we think things stand. The result - there's still a bias of activity toward centralization, but the window of contestability is still open. Looking a… - [The AI Layoff Story Is Too Simple](https://www.theraceai.org/the-ai-layoff-story-is-too-simple.md) - AI is not simply replacing jobs. It is compressing teams, shifting work outside firms, concentrating implementation expertise, and changing who holds authority. The early workforce struggle is over who controls the redesign—and whether workers can contest it. - [Is the Window of Contestability Still Open?](https://www.theraceai.org/is-the-window-of-contestability-still-open.md) - Six practical questions help reveal whether AI choices can still be changed. Applied to data centers, Android, OpenAI Presence, and Meta’s Hyperion project, they show a window being preserved, reopened, narrowed—and nearly closed. - [From Land Use to Capacity Governance: The AI Infrastructure Problem Coming Into View](https://www.theraceai.org/from-land-use-to-capacity-governance-the-ai-infrastructure-problem-coming-into-view.md) - AI data centers are no longer merely local land-use projects. They are claims on regional power, water, infrastructure, and public capacity. Can our distributed institutions govern the whole before the choices become difficult to reverse? - [Updates: Changes in The Race and the website](https://www.theraceai.org/updates-changes-in-the-race-and-the-website.md) - I have spent the last several weeks reorganizing and restructuring the website of The Race. The major change is rather than try to reduce coverage to a single stream, we're now tracking activity across eight 'lanes'. Activity in AI adoption is happening in so many places in so many ways it proved u… - [Institutional Capacity to Contest: Why an Open Window Means Little Without the Power to Act](https://www.theraceai.org/institutional-capacity-to-contest-why-an-open-window-means-little-without-the-power-to-act.md) - AI will not reshape society through algorithms alone. It will depend on whether governments, schools, utilities, and other public institutions develop the capacity to understand, procure, and govern it before dependence on a handful of private actors becomes the default. - [Utility Governance Is Democracy’s Entry Point Into the AI Race](https://www.theraceai.org/utility-governance-is-democracys-entry-point-into-the-ai-race.md) - AI’s physical expansion depends on electricity, water, land, and grid access. That gives utilities, regulators, and local governments a crucial opening to shape who pays, who benefits, and whether the public retains a meaningful say in the AI race. - [States Are Starting to Build the Public Layer for AI](https://www.theraceai.org/states-are-starting-to-build-the-public-layer-for-ai.md) - States are beginning to build a public layer for AI through inventories, procurement rules, training, shared tools, and limits on consequential uses. The framework is emerging, but dependence on private platforms remains its weakest point. - [Buying AI Is the Easy Part](https://www.theraceai.org/buying-ai-is-the-easy-part.md) - Buying access to AI is easy. Durable implementation capacity depends on whether organizations can redesign workflows, train people, preserve learning, and switch providers without surrendering control to vendors or platforms. - [Who Gets Access to Frontier AI?](https://www.theraceai.org/who-gets-access-to-frontier-ai.md) - Governments are beginning to decide who can access frontier AI, under what safeguards, and through which trusted-user systems. The challenge is to address real security risks without turning advanced capability into permanent discretionary privilege. - [What Would It Take to Make AI Public Infrastructure?](https://www.theraceai.org/what-would-it-take-to-make-ai-public-infrastructure.md) - Public models and public compute are only the beginning. AI becomes public infrastructure when governments and civic institutions can use, adapt, govern, and sustain it without becoming permanently dependent on a single vendor. - [When the Doorway Becomes the Operating Layer](https://www.theraceai.org/when-the-doorway-becomes-the-operating-layer-2.md) - AI assistants may begin as convenient doorways into information and services, then become the operating layer that shapes what users see, choose, and do. The challenge is to preserve that convenience while keeping the path open, portable, and contestable. - [The AI Concentration Window: Why We May Overreact to AI's First Shocks and Underreact to the Power Structures Forming Beneath Them](https://www.theraceai.org/the-ai-concentration-window.md) - AI may be overhyped in the short run and underestimated in the long run. The lag before its benefits spread is also a concentration window, when infrastructure, defaults, and dependencies may harden around a few powerful actors. - [Coming soon](https://www.theraceai.org/coming-soon.md) - This is The Race: Building Democracy in the Age of AI, a brand new site by Mark Howard that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published! ## Optional - [RSS Feed](https://www.theraceai.org/blog/rss/) - [Sitemap](https://www.theraceai.org/sitemap.xml) - [Full content of pages and posts](https://www.theraceai.org/llms-full.txt)