How the Scoreboard Works

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 regulation can strengthen accountability but also favor organizations large enough to comply. A major infrastructure project can provide useful capacity while placing control over essential resources in fewer hands.

The Scoreboard is designed to preserve those tensions rather than force every development into a simple good-or-bad category.

What Gets Scored

The Scoreboard focuses on concrete developments that may change institutions, markets, public capacity, or the distribution of power.

These can include:

• Laws, regulations, court decisions, and enforcement actions.
• Public infrastructure approvals, conditions, moratoria, and cost decisions.
• Changes in access to advanced models or computing capacity.
• Major public contracts and AI deployments.
• Platform rules, standards, and changes in market architecture.
• Significant workforce or organizational restructuring.
• New public, civic, or worker capacity.
• Changes that make important decisions more—or less—visible and open to challenge.

An announcement alone is usually not enough. There should be a formal action, meaningful adoption, durable capacity, institutional consequence, or clear change in public contestability.

That does not mean waiting until every long-term result is known. A law can be scored when it is enacted. A formal program can be scored when it is launched. A major contract or infrastructure decision can be scored when it is approved. The later effects may change the reading, but the institutional action itself matters.

Civic action can also count. A protest, coalition, public campaign, or other form of mobilization may be scored when the exercise of civic capacity is itself concrete, novel, and consequential—not only after it produces a new law or policy.

Direction of Power

Each scored development receives a directional reading.

Concentration does not simply mean that an organization is large. Scale may be necessary. The question is whether other institutions retain meaningful choices, alternatives, bargaining power, oversight, and the ability to leave.

Dispersion does not mean that everyone receives equal access to everything. It means that useful capacity, authority, or accountability is becoming more broadly distributed—and that powerful systems remain open to challenge.

The Window of Contestability

The Scoreboard separately asks whether the opportunity to shape an emerging system remains open.

This distinction matters because a relatively modest decision can have large consequences if it locks in infrastructure, contracts, technical standards, or institutional expectations. Conversely, a moratorium, appeal, open standard, or new public alternative can matter because it creates time and restores choices.

Transparency and Contestability

Some developments affect not only who holds power, but whether the exercise of that power can be seen and challenged.

The Scoreboard therefore also considers whether a development creates:

• Public reporting or disclosure.
• Clear standards and decision rules.
• Independent evaluation.
• Audit, appeal, or review rights.
• Procurement visibility.
• Public inventories or registries.
• Meaningful outside participation.

The opposite movement occurs when important decisions shift into proprietary, classified, discretionary, or otherwise opaque systems.

Transparency is not sufficient by itself. Information matters most when someone has the authority and capacity to act on it.

From Events to Lane Readings

The Scoreboard follows eight connected lanes because the AI race is unfolding across several different systems at once.

Individual developments are assigned to the lane where their principal effect occurs. They may also affect one or more secondary lanes.

The monthly lane reading is not produced by simply adding up scores. A dozen small announcements should not outweigh one durable institutional change. Instead, the Scoreboard considers the strength, scale, durability, and interaction of the developments within each lane.

The result is a current judgment:

• Which way power appears to be moving.
• How open the window remains.
• How confident the evidence allows us to be.
• What future developments could change the reading.

A Current Reading, Not a Final Verdict

The Scoreboard records judgments based on the evidence available at the time.

Those judgments can change. A law may be enacted but weakly enforced. A promising public program may remain symbolic. An open standard may produce real interoperability or become another route into a dominant platform. A concentrated system may later become more contestable through regulation, litigation, public investment, technical change, or civic action.

For that reason, the Scoreboard is updated as evidence accumulates. Earlier developments may be revised when implementation reveals more about their actual effects.

The methodology may also continue to develop as the research deepens and the strengths and limits of the approach become clearer. The purpose is not false precision. It is disciplined public judgment about where power is moving, where meaningful alternatives remain, and where democratic attention is most urgently needed.