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TechFreedom: Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- TechFreedom, a technology policy think tank, issued the following news release:
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Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit
September 16, 2026
Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by twenty-one scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court's ruling and hold that California's SB 976, the "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act," violates the First Amendment. Our brief explains why speculative claims of harm to minors do ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- TechFreedom, a technology policy think tank, issued the following news release: * * * Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit September 16, 2026 Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by twenty-one scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court's ruling and hold that California's SB 976, the "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act," violates the First Amendment. Our brief explains why speculative claims of harm to minors donot justify the law.
"The research does not establish that social media causes mental-health problems or addiction in minors," the amici told the court. "Every few decades, a new mode of communications stands accused of harming the young. Novels, films, comic books, television, video games, and more--all have had their turn being accused of corrupting young people. Each time, the evidence fails to sustain the alarm. Social media in general and personalized feeds specifically are the latest entries in this tradition--and the pattern holds."
"Fortunately, the First Amendment--and the absence of evidence behind California's supposed compelling interest--stand in the way of such misguided policy," the amici continued. "The most rigorous research in this area--including the largest meta-analyses and cohort studies--finds either no clinically meaningful association between social-media use and adolescent mental health or correlations so small as to lack practical significance. Claims about social media's supposed 'addictiveness' are equally weak. Evidence of an association between personalized feeds and youth mental-health is even thinner: There are zero peer-reviewed studies finding a causal link between personalization and harm to the mental health of minors."
"Minors report a generally positive relationship with social media," the amici concluded. "None of this is to deny that some adolescents struggle. The evidence, however, strongly suggests that social media itself is not the cause, and scientific research on personalized feeds is nonexistent. In fact, the best available survey data shows that the overwhelming majority of teenagers describe their experience with social media as positive or neutral."
The case is Meta Platforms, Inc. v. Bonta, No. 26-5120 (9th Cir.).
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Find this brief on our website, and share it on Twitter and Bluesky. We can be reached for comment at media@techfreedom.org. Read our related work, including:
* Amicus brief urging Fifth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Texas's App Store Accountability Act (June 24, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging the Fourth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Virginia's screen-time law (May 22, 2025)
* Congressional Republicans Push Bills That Would Block Kids Access To Content For Ideological Reasons, Techdirt (Mar. 9, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging the Eighth Circuit to block Arkansas's social-media age-verification law (Jan. 27, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging SCOTUS to vacate a Mississippi law containing broad age-verification and parental-consent mandates (July 24, 2025)
* Statement on the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton ruling (June 27, 2025)
* No, Internet Age Verification Has Not Been "Solved", Tech Policy Podcast (Apr. 30, 2025)
* Letter expressing concerns about the Kids Off Social Media Act (Feb. 5, 2025)
* Age-Verification Laws are a Verified Mistake, Law & Liberty (Jan. 9, 2025)
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About TechFreedom:
TechFreedom is a nonprofit, nonpartisan technology policy think tank. We work to chart a path forward for policymakers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.
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Original text here: https://techfreedom.org/social-media-panic-unsupported-by-evidence-researchers-tell-ninth-circuit/
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit
September 16, 2026
Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by twenty-one scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court's ruling and hold that California's SB 976, the "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act," violates the First Amendment. Our brief explains why speculative claims of harm to minors do ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- TechFreedom, a technology policy think tank, issued the following news release: * * * Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit September 16, 2026 Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by twenty-one scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court's ruling and hold that California's SB 976, the "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act," violates the First Amendment. Our brief explains why speculative claims of harm to minors donot justify the law.
"The research does not establish that social media causes mental-health problems or addiction in minors," the amici told the court. "Every few decades, a new mode of communications stands accused of harming the young. Novels, films, comic books, television, video games, and more--all have had their turn being accused of corrupting young people. Each time, the evidence fails to sustain the alarm. Social media in general and personalized feeds specifically are the latest entries in this tradition--and the pattern holds."
"Fortunately, the First Amendment--and the absence of evidence behind California's supposed compelling interest--stand in the way of such misguided policy," the amici continued. "The most rigorous research in this area--including the largest meta-analyses and cohort studies--finds either no clinically meaningful association between social-media use and adolescent mental health or correlations so small as to lack practical significance. Claims about social media's supposed 'addictiveness' are equally weak. Evidence of an association between personalized feeds and youth mental-health is even thinner: There are zero peer-reviewed studies finding a causal link between personalization and harm to the mental health of minors."
"Minors report a generally positive relationship with social media," the amici concluded. "None of this is to deny that some adolescents struggle. The evidence, however, strongly suggests that social media itself is not the cause, and scientific research on personalized feeds is nonexistent. In fact, the best available survey data shows that the overwhelming majority of teenagers describe their experience with social media as positive or neutral."
The case is Meta Platforms, Inc. v. Bonta, No. 26-5120 (9th Cir.).
###
Find this brief on our website, and share it on Twitter and Bluesky. We can be reached for comment at media@techfreedom.org. Read our related work, including:
* Amicus brief urging Fifth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Texas's App Store Accountability Act (June 24, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging the Fourth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Virginia's screen-time law (May 22, 2025)
* Congressional Republicans Push Bills That Would Block Kids Access To Content For Ideological Reasons, Techdirt (Mar. 9, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging the Eighth Circuit to block Arkansas's social-media age-verification law (Jan. 27, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging SCOTUS to vacate a Mississippi law containing broad age-verification and parental-consent mandates (July 24, 2025)
* Statement on the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton ruling (June 27, 2025)
* No, Internet Age Verification Has Not Been "Solved", Tech Policy Podcast (Apr. 30, 2025)
* Letter expressing concerns about the Kids Off Social Media Act (Feb. 5, 2025)
* Age-Verification Laws are a Verified Mistake, Law & Liberty (Jan. 9, 2025)
* * *
About TechFreedom:
TechFreedom is a nonprofit, nonpartisan technology policy think tank. We work to chart a path forward for policymakers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.
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Original text here: https://techfreedom.org/social-media-panic-unsupported-by-evidence-researchers-tell-ninth-circuit/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Rand: Preserving Jobs and Tax Revenue in the Age of AI - Q&A With Carter Price
SANTA MONICA, California, Sept. 19 -- Rand issued the following Q&A on Sept. 17, 2026, involving Carter C. Price, senior mathematician and a professor of policy analysis at the School of Public Policy:
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Preserving Jobs and Tax Revenue in the Age of AI: Q&A with Carter Price
If AI starts to replace jobs, it isn't just American workers who will feel the loss of income. So will the U.S. Treasury.
Nearly two-thirds of all federal revenue comes from taxes levied on human labor, a recent RAND study noted. That revenue will not be easy to make up if AI starts to put large numbers of people out ... Show Full Article SANTA MONICA, California, Sept. 19 -- Rand issued the following Q&A on Sept. 17, 2026, involving Carter C. Price, senior mathematician and a professor of policy analysis at the School of Public Policy: * * * Preserving Jobs and Tax Revenue in the Age of AI: Q&A with Carter Price If AI starts to replace jobs, it isn't just American workers who will feel the loss of income. So will the U.S. Treasury. Nearly two-thirds of all federal revenue comes from taxes levied on human labor, a recent RAND study noted. That revenue will not be easy to make up if AI starts to put large numbers of people outof work.
Carter Price has been looking for ways to rebalance the tax code so that it doesn't incentivize employers to replace humans with AI. He's a mathematician at RAND and co-director of the RAND Von Furstenberg Family Budget Model Initiative. And he has an idea for how to give workers an edge in the age of AI.
Q: How does the existing tax code disincentivize keeping human workers on the job?
A: We went through all 7,000 pages of the tax code with a tool we built as part of the RAND Budget Model Initiative. It allows us to identify every provision, every line item, and its implications. There's a lot in there. But we identified several places where the existing U.S tax code works against companies hiring or keeping workers.
The employer payroll tax is one obvious example. Companies have to pay that tax for every worker they hire, so more workers means more expense. Meanwhile, the tax code allows companies to write off the depreciation of big, expensive assets early, before those assets actually wear out. That can make buying something like a robotic system much more cost-effective--which makes that tax write-off a direct subsidy for displacing human workers.
What's your idea to change the incentives here?
You and I pay progressive taxes on our income. That means if we make more money, we move into a higher tax bracket.
Our idea is somewhat similar, but for companies. The government would tax high corporate profits per worker in addition to taxing their income overall.
Imagine a company makes $1 million in profit and has 100 employees. Its profit per worker is $10,000. Now let's say that company brings in a lot of AI and lays off all but ten of its workers. Now its profit per worker is $100,000, and it just moved into a higher tax bracket. It's going to pay more in taxes for that same $1 million in profit.
AI might still be so much more efficient that it still makes sense for some companies to replace those workers. This tax structure wouldn't stand in the way of that.
But where the current tax code sometimes disincentivizes keeping human workers, our proposed change would flip the script. It would put the tax code more on the side of workers instead of on the side of AI and automation.
What else did your tax code analysis find that could help promote employment?
We found a lot of special, niche provisions that are just scattered throughout the tax code. You could eliminate those and really clean everything up. There are three different clean-energy vehicle tax provisions, for example, and they all do pretty much the same thing.
These niche provisions pointed us to a suite of changes that could really make a difference. The government could eliminate those special tax breaks. That would bring in additional revenue.
The federal government could then eliminate the employer payroll tax and replace it with two business taxes: one a flat tax on business revenue, and the other the per-worker tax on high profits.
Companies would be no worse off. The government would balance the loss of revenue from eliminating the payroll tax with an increase from eliminating special tax carve-outs. And we'd be incentivizing human employment instead of using tax breaks to incentivize things like investments in distilled spirits.
What would it take to implement those changes?
It takes an act of Congress to change the Internal Revenue Code. But that's a low barrier compared to what some other popular policy ideas that are floating around would face. For example, a value-added tax, which would be like a nationwide sales tax, would require an entirely new tax-collection infrastructure. And a federal wealth tax, which could generate revenue from huge concentrations of wealth, would require a constitutional amendment in addition to new tax-collection infrastructure.
By contrast, policymakers could at least theoretically wake up tomorrow and pass a law that would make the tax code more robust by reducing its dependence on income from labor.
Furthermore, simplifying the tax code would give people back millions of hours that they currently spend filling out forms. It would improve the efficiency of the economy, and that's something everyone can like.
What motivates you to do this work?
I'm a mathematician. And there have been a lot of headlines about the advances that AI models have made in mathematics in particular. AI can generate code that would take a human hours, or even days, to write. I'm biased, but I think human mathematicians still provide a lot of value that AI can't fully replace. I'm not sure that will be true forever. But until that changes, we shouldn't rush into replacing workers with AI, and our tax code certainly shouldn't incentivize employers to do so.
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Original text here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2026/09/preserving-jobs-and-tax-revenue-in-the-age-of-ai-qa.html
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Preserving Jobs and Tax Revenue in the Age of AI: Q&A with Carter Price
If AI starts to replace jobs, it isn't just American workers who will feel the loss of income. So will the U.S. Treasury.
Nearly two-thirds of all federal revenue comes from taxes levied on human labor, a recent RAND study noted. That revenue will not be easy to make up if AI starts to put large numbers of people out ... Show Full Article SANTA MONICA, California, Sept. 19 -- Rand issued the following Q&A on Sept. 17, 2026, involving Carter C. Price, senior mathematician and a professor of policy analysis at the School of Public Policy: * * * Preserving Jobs and Tax Revenue in the Age of AI: Q&A with Carter Price If AI starts to replace jobs, it isn't just American workers who will feel the loss of income. So will the U.S. Treasury. Nearly two-thirds of all federal revenue comes from taxes levied on human labor, a recent RAND study noted. That revenue will not be easy to make up if AI starts to put large numbers of people outof work.
Carter Price has been looking for ways to rebalance the tax code so that it doesn't incentivize employers to replace humans with AI. He's a mathematician at RAND and co-director of the RAND Von Furstenberg Family Budget Model Initiative. And he has an idea for how to give workers an edge in the age of AI.
Q: How does the existing tax code disincentivize keeping human workers on the job?
A: We went through all 7,000 pages of the tax code with a tool we built as part of the RAND Budget Model Initiative. It allows us to identify every provision, every line item, and its implications. There's a lot in there. But we identified several places where the existing U.S tax code works against companies hiring or keeping workers.
The employer payroll tax is one obvious example. Companies have to pay that tax for every worker they hire, so more workers means more expense. Meanwhile, the tax code allows companies to write off the depreciation of big, expensive assets early, before those assets actually wear out. That can make buying something like a robotic system much more cost-effective--which makes that tax write-off a direct subsidy for displacing human workers.
What's your idea to change the incentives here?
You and I pay progressive taxes on our income. That means if we make more money, we move into a higher tax bracket.
Our idea is somewhat similar, but for companies. The government would tax high corporate profits per worker in addition to taxing their income overall.
Imagine a company makes $1 million in profit and has 100 employees. Its profit per worker is $10,000. Now let's say that company brings in a lot of AI and lays off all but ten of its workers. Now its profit per worker is $100,000, and it just moved into a higher tax bracket. It's going to pay more in taxes for that same $1 million in profit.
AI might still be so much more efficient that it still makes sense for some companies to replace those workers. This tax structure wouldn't stand in the way of that.
But where the current tax code sometimes disincentivizes keeping human workers, our proposed change would flip the script. It would put the tax code more on the side of workers instead of on the side of AI and automation.
What else did your tax code analysis find that could help promote employment?
We found a lot of special, niche provisions that are just scattered throughout the tax code. You could eliminate those and really clean everything up. There are three different clean-energy vehicle tax provisions, for example, and they all do pretty much the same thing.
These niche provisions pointed us to a suite of changes that could really make a difference. The government could eliminate those special tax breaks. That would bring in additional revenue.
The federal government could then eliminate the employer payroll tax and replace it with two business taxes: one a flat tax on business revenue, and the other the per-worker tax on high profits.
Companies would be no worse off. The government would balance the loss of revenue from eliminating the payroll tax with an increase from eliminating special tax carve-outs. And we'd be incentivizing human employment instead of using tax breaks to incentivize things like investments in distilled spirits.
What would it take to implement those changes?
It takes an act of Congress to change the Internal Revenue Code. But that's a low barrier compared to what some other popular policy ideas that are floating around would face. For example, a value-added tax, which would be like a nationwide sales tax, would require an entirely new tax-collection infrastructure. And a federal wealth tax, which could generate revenue from huge concentrations of wealth, would require a constitutional amendment in addition to new tax-collection infrastructure.
By contrast, policymakers could at least theoretically wake up tomorrow and pass a law that would make the tax code more robust by reducing its dependence on income from labor.
Furthermore, simplifying the tax code would give people back millions of hours that they currently spend filling out forms. It would improve the efficiency of the economy, and that's something everyone can like.
What motivates you to do this work?
I'm a mathematician. And there have been a lot of headlines about the advances that AI models have made in mathematics in particular. AI can generate code that would take a human hours, or even days, to write. I'm biased, but I think human mathematicians still provide a lot of value that AI can't fully replace. I'm not sure that will be true forever. But until that changes, we shouldn't rush into replacing workers with AI, and our tax code certainly shouldn't incentivize employers to do so.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2026/09/preserving-jobs-and-tax-revenue-in-the-age-of-ai-qa.html
[Category: ThinkTank]
Jamestown Foundation Issues Commentary: Balancing Development and Security in Global AI Governance
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Sept. 18, 2026, in the foundation's China Brief:
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Balancing Development and Security in Global AI Governance
Arran Hope
Executive Summary:
* Artificial intelligence (AI) is a core pillar of "comprehensive national power" in the People's Republic of China (PRC), where senior officials frame the necessity of leadership in AI development as crucial for gaining an advantage in great power competition.
* Beijing is increasingly concerned about AI-related risks. Its calls for a global AI governance framework, ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Sept. 18, 2026, in the foundation's China Brief: * * * Balancing Development and Security in Global AI Governance Arran Hope Executive Summary: * Artificial intelligence (AI) is a core pillar of "comprehensive national power" in the People's Republic of China (PRC), where senior officials frame the necessity of leadership in AI development as crucial for gaining an advantage in great power competition. * Beijing is increasingly concerned about AI-related risks. Its calls for a global AI governance framework,however, are less about managing risks than about building non-Western influence in the AI domain.
* A recent collection of unusual People's Daily articles on global AI governance advocate positioning the PRC as the rule-maker in the international system. None calls for cooperation with the United States, suggesting that this is not currently a priority for Beijing.
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Beijing is fully committed to the pursuit of supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Officials frequently tie the technology to the country's "comprehensive national power" (CNP), which Chinese leader Xi Jinping has stated must surpass that of the United States in order to achieve the Party's primary aim of national rejuvenation (Xinhua, September 26, 2021; China Brief, July 9).
Recent articles from prominent officials and researchers have nevertheless shifted equal focus to the myriad risks associated with AI. This partly stems from very real concerns about the hard problems that rapid technological progress presents; but it is equally about the Party's persistent preoccupation with political control and its attempts to exert more influence over the direction of international approaches to governing AI.
No Slowdown in Sight
A People's Daily article from early 2025 laid out the stakes with unusual clarity. Written by an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering named Gao Wen, the article argues forcefully that the People's Republic of China (PRC) should spare no efforts in its pursuit of AI progress. [1] Gao describes the technology as a "core element in measuring a nation's CNP", an "essential requirement" for consolidating the foundation of a strong nation, and the "strategic high ground in great power competition". "Whoever gains the upper hand and seizes the initiative in the field of AI," he writes, "will gain greater influence on the international stage". He concludes by admonishing his readers that "opportunity knocks but once", calling for "unswervingly promoting" the innovative development of AI (People's Daily, February 24, 2025).
Subsequent official statements echo Gao's analysis. A recent People's Daily commentary, which described AI as "a strategic technology affecting a nation's CNP", resembled quotes from politburo standing committee member Ding Xuexiang and state media describing computing power and AI talent as important manifestations of CNP (People's Daily, May 19, May 30; CCTV, June 6). Most recently, Minister for State Security Chen Yixin, in a widely-read article for China Cyberspace Magazine, used a similar framing, saying that "whoever can seize the development opportunities of AI ... will have grasped the pulse of the times" (WeChat/China Cyberspace Magazine, September 12).
Theory Articles Articulate Global Governance Approach
Six articles published in the People's Daily in August underscore the extreme seriousness with which Beijing is approaching AI development and competition. What makes these articles unusual is their format. In each case, they appear in pairs, with their headlines printed vertically rather than horizontally--an editorial decision that the China Media Project has described as "a propaganda appropriation of the traditional parallel saying, or duilian (Substack/Lingua Sinica, August 18).[2]
These articles all focus on the global governance of AI. Each takes as its departure point a quote from Chinese leader Xi Jinping's speech at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which was held this summer in Beijing (China Brief, July 22, August 13). While the first two pieces were authored by a reporter for the newspaper and appeared on the front page of the People's Daily, the others were all commentaries published on the theory pages. The authors of these commentaries comprised the following senior personnel at important governance and research institutions:
* Xue Lan: dean of the Institute for International Governance of Artificial Intelligence at Tsinghua University
- (co-author) Chen Ying: special researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era
* Wei Liang: vice president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT)
* Chen Zhimin: researcher at the Fudan University Base of the Shanghai Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era
* Zhang Weiwei: deputy director of the Institute of World Peace and Security at the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS)
The collection of theoretical commentaries trace Beijing's global ambitions for AI governance.[3] The first pair lays out how recent PRC actions lay the groundwork for AI to become an "international public good that benefits all of humanity", and why "Chinese wisdom" (offers the only viable route to international cooperation (People's Daily, August 20, [a], [b]). The second pair, published the following week, articulates the PRC's principles, guidance, and actions for "leading global AI governance", and frames them in relation to the country's four global initiatives, which cover development, security, civilization, and global governance (People's Daily, August 26, [a], [b]).
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Figure 1: The Theory Page of the August 20 People's Daily
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The discussion of Beijing's approach repeats many of the same points of the country's now-familiar pitch to the world. Wei Liang provides a succinct distillation of this. He writes in his article that "China will strengthen the alignment and coordination of its AI development strategies, governance rules, and technical standards, forging a path of open consultation, multi-party participation, mutual trust, and joint governance". Chen Zhimin then adds some specifics. He suggests that global AI governance should focus on expanding Beijing's preferred rights--to develop, use, and benefit from AI--and highlights several regional institutions and cooperation mechanisms to support this agenda. At the center of these is the World AI Cooperation Organization, which he says aims to "transform interim meetings and policy dialogues into regular institutional cooperation, incorporating development strategies, governance rules, technical standards, capacity building, and joint research into a relatively stable cooperation framework".
Setting out this ambitious agenda is ostensibly the primary purpose for these articles. At the same time, AI-related risks emerge as a dominant preoccupation of each of these expert commentators.
Balancing Risks a Growing Preoccupation
The Chinese government has, for nearly a decade, viewed security with the same degree of importance as development. Numerous documents published in recent years have discussed the need to balance these two sides of the governance coin (Wang, 2023).[4] In the AI era, however, striking that balance is more challenging than ever. The government's Artificial Intelligence Security Governance Framework 3.0, released earlier this week, provides the most comprehensive list of all perceived threats AI poses (Cyberspace Administration of China, September 14).
The four theoretical commentaries, coupled with Chen Yixin's article, all strike a concerned, if not alarmist, tone. In their article, after the introductory paragraph with its mandatory quote from Xi Jinping, Xue Lan and Chen Ying immediately turn to concerns about AI safety. They discuss the need to protect against "various endogenous and derivative risks", and to create "laws and regulations, technological supervision, risk warning, and emergency response systems, and to construct a security bottom line and prevent abuse and misuse".
Several of the authors advocate for a global governance framework precisely because of what they see as the scale of AI risks. Xue Lan and Chen Ying describe these risks as "transnational, complex, and systemic" , and warn that a shared vulnerability could lead to a collective failure. Wei Liang, meanwhile, writes that the danger of "risk spillover" underscores the urgency of governance efforts, and he worries that AI's increasing integration with critical infrastructure could potentially escalate into systemic risks. Zhang Weiwei similarly sees a breakthrough on governance as "urgently needed", as the risks mean that AI governance "cannot be confined to the level of a single nation". In a brief discussion of military applications of AI, he warns that "the relentless pursuit of asymmetric advantages through technology will exacerbate the security predicament of the international community, leading to greater insecurity and even a tragedy for all humanity".
Any workable global governance framework would need buy-in from the United States. On this point, however, the authors have little in the way of suggestions, instead choosing to recite standard critical refrains. One warns that countries that follow their own approach "harm the common interests of all countries". Another denounces "some countries" who view AI as "a tool for great power competition", leading to "fragmentation and factionalism" in global governance mechanisms. A third also implicitly criticizes the United States for attempting to "monopolize rule-making" and "increasing the difficulty of coordinating global governance" in order to "maintain or expand [its] own advantages". This all indicates that Beijing's bid for global AI governance is more about building power and influence outside of the West. As one scholar recently observed, the PRC seeks to build consensus among Global South countries to "unify their negotiating positions, and enhance their seats and weight in international standard setting and governance consultations" in order to "break down technological hegemony and rule monopolies"(Wen Wei Po, July 28).
Conclusion
Beijing is making its pitch to lead the global governance of AI, but cooperation on AI is by no means a priority. Chen Yixin's article shows this most clearly. Among a list of eight basic points to adhere to, international cooperation ranks last, while AI's "strategic positioning" comes first; and of seven policy prescriptions he sets out, international cooperation is again bottom of the list, while pole position is given to upholding the Party's overall leadership. This suggests that Beijing's interpretation of AI safety differs from Western understandings in important ways. It also suggests that cooperation with Washington is not a priority that any official or Party-aligned voices are currently advocating for.
* * *
Arran Hope is the editor of China Brief at The Jamestown Foundation, where he also has responsibility for additional China-related publications and programming.
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Original text here: https://jamestown.org/balancing-development-and-security-in-global-ai-governance/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Balancing Development and Security in Global AI Governance
Arran Hope
Executive Summary:
* Artificial intelligence (AI) is a core pillar of "comprehensive national power" in the People's Republic of China (PRC), where senior officials frame the necessity of leadership in AI development as crucial for gaining an advantage in great power competition.
* Beijing is increasingly concerned about AI-related risks. Its calls for a global AI governance framework, ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Sept. 18, 2026, in the foundation's China Brief: * * * Balancing Development and Security in Global AI Governance Arran Hope Executive Summary: * Artificial intelligence (AI) is a core pillar of "comprehensive national power" in the People's Republic of China (PRC), where senior officials frame the necessity of leadership in AI development as crucial for gaining an advantage in great power competition. * Beijing is increasingly concerned about AI-related risks. Its calls for a global AI governance framework,however, are less about managing risks than about building non-Western influence in the AI domain.
* A recent collection of unusual People's Daily articles on global AI governance advocate positioning the PRC as the rule-maker in the international system. None calls for cooperation with the United States, suggesting that this is not currently a priority for Beijing.
-
Beijing is fully committed to the pursuit of supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Officials frequently tie the technology to the country's "comprehensive national power" (CNP), which Chinese leader Xi Jinping has stated must surpass that of the United States in order to achieve the Party's primary aim of national rejuvenation (Xinhua, September 26, 2021; China Brief, July 9).
Recent articles from prominent officials and researchers have nevertheless shifted equal focus to the myriad risks associated with AI. This partly stems from very real concerns about the hard problems that rapid technological progress presents; but it is equally about the Party's persistent preoccupation with political control and its attempts to exert more influence over the direction of international approaches to governing AI.
No Slowdown in Sight
A People's Daily article from early 2025 laid out the stakes with unusual clarity. Written by an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering named Gao Wen, the article argues forcefully that the People's Republic of China (PRC) should spare no efforts in its pursuit of AI progress. [1] Gao describes the technology as a "core element in measuring a nation's CNP", an "essential requirement" for consolidating the foundation of a strong nation, and the "strategic high ground in great power competition". "Whoever gains the upper hand and seizes the initiative in the field of AI," he writes, "will gain greater influence on the international stage". He concludes by admonishing his readers that "opportunity knocks but once", calling for "unswervingly promoting" the innovative development of AI (People's Daily, February 24, 2025).
Subsequent official statements echo Gao's analysis. A recent People's Daily commentary, which described AI as "a strategic technology affecting a nation's CNP", resembled quotes from politburo standing committee member Ding Xuexiang and state media describing computing power and AI talent as important manifestations of CNP (People's Daily, May 19, May 30; CCTV, June 6). Most recently, Minister for State Security Chen Yixin, in a widely-read article for China Cyberspace Magazine, used a similar framing, saying that "whoever can seize the development opportunities of AI ... will have grasped the pulse of the times" (WeChat/China Cyberspace Magazine, September 12).
Theory Articles Articulate Global Governance Approach
Six articles published in the People's Daily in August underscore the extreme seriousness with which Beijing is approaching AI development and competition. What makes these articles unusual is their format. In each case, they appear in pairs, with their headlines printed vertically rather than horizontally--an editorial decision that the China Media Project has described as "a propaganda appropriation of the traditional parallel saying, or duilian (Substack/Lingua Sinica, August 18).[2]
These articles all focus on the global governance of AI. Each takes as its departure point a quote from Chinese leader Xi Jinping's speech at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which was held this summer in Beijing (China Brief, July 22, August 13). While the first two pieces were authored by a reporter for the newspaper and appeared on the front page of the People's Daily, the others were all commentaries published on the theory pages. The authors of these commentaries comprised the following senior personnel at important governance and research institutions:
* Xue Lan: dean of the Institute for International Governance of Artificial Intelligence at Tsinghua University
- (co-author) Chen Ying: special researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era
* Wei Liang: vice president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT)
* Chen Zhimin: researcher at the Fudan University Base of the Shanghai Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era
* Zhang Weiwei: deputy director of the Institute of World Peace and Security at the China Institute of International Studies (CIIS)
The collection of theoretical commentaries trace Beijing's global ambitions for AI governance.[3] The first pair lays out how recent PRC actions lay the groundwork for AI to become an "international public good that benefits all of humanity", and why "Chinese wisdom" (offers the only viable route to international cooperation (People's Daily, August 20, [a], [b]). The second pair, published the following week, articulates the PRC's principles, guidance, and actions for "leading global AI governance", and frames them in relation to the country's four global initiatives, which cover development, security, civilization, and global governance (People's Daily, August 26, [a], [b]).
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Figure 1: The Theory Page of the August 20 People's Daily
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The discussion of Beijing's approach repeats many of the same points of the country's now-familiar pitch to the world. Wei Liang provides a succinct distillation of this. He writes in his article that "China will strengthen the alignment and coordination of its AI development strategies, governance rules, and technical standards, forging a path of open consultation, multi-party participation, mutual trust, and joint governance". Chen Zhimin then adds some specifics. He suggests that global AI governance should focus on expanding Beijing's preferred rights--to develop, use, and benefit from AI--and highlights several regional institutions and cooperation mechanisms to support this agenda. At the center of these is the World AI Cooperation Organization, which he says aims to "transform interim meetings and policy dialogues into regular institutional cooperation, incorporating development strategies, governance rules, technical standards, capacity building, and joint research into a relatively stable cooperation framework".
Setting out this ambitious agenda is ostensibly the primary purpose for these articles. At the same time, AI-related risks emerge as a dominant preoccupation of each of these expert commentators.
Balancing Risks a Growing Preoccupation
The Chinese government has, for nearly a decade, viewed security with the same degree of importance as development. Numerous documents published in recent years have discussed the need to balance these two sides of the governance coin (Wang, 2023).[4] In the AI era, however, striking that balance is more challenging than ever. The government's Artificial Intelligence Security Governance Framework 3.0, released earlier this week, provides the most comprehensive list of all perceived threats AI poses (Cyberspace Administration of China, September 14).
The four theoretical commentaries, coupled with Chen Yixin's article, all strike a concerned, if not alarmist, tone. In their article, after the introductory paragraph with its mandatory quote from Xi Jinping, Xue Lan and Chen Ying immediately turn to concerns about AI safety. They discuss the need to protect against "various endogenous and derivative risks", and to create "laws and regulations, technological supervision, risk warning, and emergency response systems, and to construct a security bottom line and prevent abuse and misuse".
Several of the authors advocate for a global governance framework precisely because of what they see as the scale of AI risks. Xue Lan and Chen Ying describe these risks as "transnational, complex, and systemic" , and warn that a shared vulnerability could lead to a collective failure. Wei Liang, meanwhile, writes that the danger of "risk spillover" underscores the urgency of governance efforts, and he worries that AI's increasing integration with critical infrastructure could potentially escalate into systemic risks. Zhang Weiwei similarly sees a breakthrough on governance as "urgently needed", as the risks mean that AI governance "cannot be confined to the level of a single nation". In a brief discussion of military applications of AI, he warns that "the relentless pursuit of asymmetric advantages through technology will exacerbate the security predicament of the international community, leading to greater insecurity and even a tragedy for all humanity".
Any workable global governance framework would need buy-in from the United States. On this point, however, the authors have little in the way of suggestions, instead choosing to recite standard critical refrains. One warns that countries that follow their own approach "harm the common interests of all countries". Another denounces "some countries" who view AI as "a tool for great power competition", leading to "fragmentation and factionalism" in global governance mechanisms. A third also implicitly criticizes the United States for attempting to "monopolize rule-making" and "increasing the difficulty of coordinating global governance" in order to "maintain or expand [its] own advantages". This all indicates that Beijing's bid for global AI governance is more about building power and influence outside of the West. As one scholar recently observed, the PRC seeks to build consensus among Global South countries to "unify their negotiating positions, and enhance their seats and weight in international standard setting and governance consultations" in order to "break down technological hegemony and rule monopolies"(Wen Wei Po, July 28).
Conclusion
Beijing is making its pitch to lead the global governance of AI, but cooperation on AI is by no means a priority. Chen Yixin's article shows this most clearly. Among a list of eight basic points to adhere to, international cooperation ranks last, while AI's "strategic positioning" comes first; and of seven policy prescriptions he sets out, international cooperation is again bottom of the list, while pole position is given to upholding the Party's overall leadership. This suggests that Beijing's interpretation of AI safety differs from Western understandings in important ways. It also suggests that cooperation with Washington is not a priority that any official or Party-aligned voices are currently advocating for.
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Arran Hope is the editor of China Brief at The Jamestown Foundation, where he also has responsibility for additional China-related publications and programming.
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Original text here: https://jamestown.org/balancing-development-and-security-in-global-ai-governance/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Ifo Institute: Joint Custody Strengthens Families After Separations
MUNICH, Germany, Sept. 19 -- ifo Institute issued the following news release:
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17 September 2026
Joint Custody Strengthens Families After Separations
When courts award joint custody rather than sole custody in contentious custody cases, fathers benefit financially and in terms of their health, and children benefit academically. Mothers do not suffer any measurable disadvantages as a result. This is shown by a new study from the ifo Institute based on Swedish court and register data.
"Public debates about custody arrangements often imply a conflict of interests: What benefits one parent ... Show Full Article MUNICH, Germany, Sept. 19 -- ifo Institute issued the following news release: * * * 17 September 2026 Joint Custody Strengthens Families After Separations When courts award joint custody rather than sole custody in contentious custody cases, fathers benefit financially and in terms of their health, and children benefit academically. Mothers do not suffer any measurable disadvantages as a result. This is shown by a new study from the ifo Institute based on Swedish court and register data. "Public debates about custody arrangements often imply a conflict of interests: What benefits one parentcomes at the expense of the other parent or the child. However, our findings show that this assumption is not supported: Joint custody strengthens the economic stability of families after a separation and promotes children's development", says Helmut Rainer, Director of the ifo Center for Labor and Demographic Economics.
Fathers with joint custody earn higher incomes, particularly those with a low income level. In addition, the likelihood that they will take antidepressants decreases by 17 percentage points. Children improve their test results and are more likely to attend better schools.
There are neither positive nor negative effects for mothers. Nor does the data corroborate fears that joint custody increases the risk of domestic violence. "The study provides empirical evidence for the family policy debates on custody arrangements that are taking place in many countries," says Rainer.
For the study, the researchers analyzed 56,188 court rulings from 45 Swedish district courts between 1992 and 2021 and linked them to register data on income, education, health, and crime.
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2026 Article in Journal
Gemeinsames Sorgerecht nach der Trennung: Effekte auf Eltern und Kinder
Clara Albrecht, Stella Canessa, Gordon B. Dahl, Anna Hasselqvist, Costas Meghir, Susan Niknami, Marten Palme, Helmut Rainer, Olof Rosenqvist, Pengpeng Xiao
ifo Schnelldienst, 2026, 79, Nr. 9 45-49
Learn more (https://www.ifo.de/en/publikationen/2026/aufsatz-zeitschrift/gemeinsames-sorgerecht-nach-trennung-effekte-auf-eltern-und-kinder)
-
2026 Journal (Complete Issue)
ifo Schnelldienst 09/2026: Unreformierbar?
Learn more (https://www.ifo.de/en/publikationen/2026/zeitschrift-einzelheft/ifo-schnelldienst-092026-unreformierbar)
-
2026 Working Paper
Life After Divorce: Effects of Joint Custody on Parents and Children
Stella Canessa, Gordon B. Dahl, Anna Hasselqvist, Costas Meghir, Susan Niknami, Marten Palme, Helmut Rainer, Olof Rosenqvist, Pengpeng Xiao
CESifo Working Paper No. 12822
Learn more (https://www.ifo.de/en/cesifo/publications/2026/working-paper/life-after-divorce-effects-joint-custody-parents-and-children)
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Original text here: https://www.ifo.de/en/press-release/2026-09-17/joint-custody-strengthens-families-after-separations
[Category: ThinkTank]
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17 September 2026
Joint Custody Strengthens Families After Separations
When courts award joint custody rather than sole custody in contentious custody cases, fathers benefit financially and in terms of their health, and children benefit academically. Mothers do not suffer any measurable disadvantages as a result. This is shown by a new study from the ifo Institute based on Swedish court and register data.
"Public debates about custody arrangements often imply a conflict of interests: What benefits one parent ... Show Full Article MUNICH, Germany, Sept. 19 -- ifo Institute issued the following news release: * * * 17 September 2026 Joint Custody Strengthens Families After Separations When courts award joint custody rather than sole custody in contentious custody cases, fathers benefit financially and in terms of their health, and children benefit academically. Mothers do not suffer any measurable disadvantages as a result. This is shown by a new study from the ifo Institute based on Swedish court and register data. "Public debates about custody arrangements often imply a conflict of interests: What benefits one parentcomes at the expense of the other parent or the child. However, our findings show that this assumption is not supported: Joint custody strengthens the economic stability of families after a separation and promotes children's development", says Helmut Rainer, Director of the ifo Center for Labor and Demographic Economics.
Fathers with joint custody earn higher incomes, particularly those with a low income level. In addition, the likelihood that they will take antidepressants decreases by 17 percentage points. Children improve their test results and are more likely to attend better schools.
There are neither positive nor negative effects for mothers. Nor does the data corroborate fears that joint custody increases the risk of domestic violence. "The study provides empirical evidence for the family policy debates on custody arrangements that are taking place in many countries," says Rainer.
For the study, the researchers analyzed 56,188 court rulings from 45 Swedish district courts between 1992 and 2021 and linked them to register data on income, education, health, and crime.
* * *
2026 Article in Journal
Gemeinsames Sorgerecht nach der Trennung: Effekte auf Eltern und Kinder
Clara Albrecht, Stella Canessa, Gordon B. Dahl, Anna Hasselqvist, Costas Meghir, Susan Niknami, Marten Palme, Helmut Rainer, Olof Rosenqvist, Pengpeng Xiao
ifo Schnelldienst, 2026, 79, Nr. 9 45-49
Learn more (https://www.ifo.de/en/publikationen/2026/aufsatz-zeitschrift/gemeinsames-sorgerecht-nach-trennung-effekte-auf-eltern-und-kinder)
-
2026 Journal (Complete Issue)
ifo Schnelldienst 09/2026: Unreformierbar?
Learn more (https://www.ifo.de/en/publikationen/2026/zeitschrift-einzelheft/ifo-schnelldienst-092026-unreformierbar)
-
2026 Working Paper
Life After Divorce: Effects of Joint Custody on Parents and Children
Stella Canessa, Gordon B. Dahl, Anna Hasselqvist, Costas Meghir, Susan Niknami, Marten Palme, Helmut Rainer, Olof Rosenqvist, Pengpeng Xiao
CESifo Working Paper No. 12822
Learn more (https://www.ifo.de/en/cesifo/publications/2026/working-paper/life-after-divorce-effects-joint-custody-parents-and-children)
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Original text here: https://www.ifo.de/en/press-release/2026-09-17/joint-custody-strengthens-families-after-separations
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center for American Progress: Unions Help Working-Class Young Men Reach Major Life Milestones
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (TNSbrep) -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release:
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Sep 17, 2026
Unions Help Working-Class Young Men Reach Major Life Milestones
Washington, D.C. -- Working-class young men who belong to unions are significantly more likely to achieve major life goals such as getting married, having children, and owning a home, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress.
Analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data from 2021 through 2025, CAP found that full-time working men under age 35 without a bachelor's degree who are union members are ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (TNSbrep) -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release: * * * Sep 17, 2026 Unions Help Working-Class Young Men Reach Major Life Milestones Washington, D.C. -- Working-class young men who belong to unions are significantly more likely to achieve major life goals such as getting married, having children, and owning a home, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress. Analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data from 2021 through 2025, CAP found that full-time working men under age 35 without a bachelor's degree who are union members are9 percentage points more likely to be married, 6.3 percentage points more likely to have children, and 10.1 percentage points more likely to own a home than their nonunion peers.
"Young men want the financial security to build a life, support a family, and own a home, and unions can help make those goals more attainable," said Aurelia Glass, policy analyst for the American Worker Project at CAP and author of the analysis. "Union jobs provide young men, especially working-class young men, with higher wages, better benefits, and a stronger voice at work. Many young men feel like financial stability is slipping further and further out of reach. Strengthening workers' freedom to organize can give more of them a real pathway to get ahead, and it's something young men support."
Among the analysis' key findings:
* Working-class union men are more likely to get married. Among young men without college degrees, 34.5 percent of union members are married compared with 25.5 percent of nonunion workers, a gap of 9 percentage points. Nearly 35 percent of union men under age 35 across education levels are married, compared with 28.8 percent of nonunion men.
* Working-class union men are more likely to have children. Among young men without a bachelor's degree, 31.5 percent of union members have at least one of their own children living in their household compared to 25.2 percent for nonunion men, a difference of 6.3 percentage points. Twenty-eight percent of young union men across education levels have their own children living in their household, compared with 22.4 percent of nonunion men.
* Working-class union men are more likely to own a home. Among young men without college degrees, union members are 10.1 percentage points more likely to be homeowners: 61.5 percent of male union members under age 35 without a bachelor's degree own their own home, compared with 51.3 percent of nonunion young men. Nearly 60 percent of union men across education levels under age 35 own their homes, compared with 51 percent of nonunion men.
* Unions provide a significant economic boost for young men. Previous research found a 17.6 percent union wage premium for men under age 35, and young union members are also substantially more likely to receive employer-provided health insurance and retirement benefits.
* Young men want greater access to unions. According to recent polling, 55 percent of men under age 30 say they would support unionizing their workplace, and 64 percent of young men in union households describe themselves as financially stable, compared with 46 percent of those outside union households. CAP polling finds that among voters, 63 percent of men under age 35 support making it easier to unionize. Yet just 6 percent of private sector workers currently belong to unions.
* Financial stability remains out of reach for many young men. Recent surveys found that just 45 percent of men under age 30 say they feel "financially stable," and although 63 percent say "[h]aving children is important to [them]," only 57 percent believe they "will be able to afford to raise children in the near future."
Read the analysis: "How Unions Help Young Working-Class Men Buy Homes and Start Families" (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-unions-help-young-working-class-men-buy-homes-and-start-families/) by Aurelia Glass
For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, please contact Christian Unkenholz at cunkenholz@americanprogress.org.
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Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-unions-help-working-class-young-men-reach-major-life-milestones/
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Sep 17, 2026
Unions Help Working-Class Young Men Reach Major Life Milestones
Washington, D.C. -- Working-class young men who belong to unions are significantly more likely to achieve major life goals such as getting married, having children, and owning a home, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress.
Analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data from 2021 through 2025, CAP found that full-time working men under age 35 without a bachelor's degree who are union members are ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (TNSbrep) -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release: * * * Sep 17, 2026 Unions Help Working-Class Young Men Reach Major Life Milestones Washington, D.C. -- Working-class young men who belong to unions are significantly more likely to achieve major life goals such as getting married, having children, and owning a home, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress. Analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data from 2021 through 2025, CAP found that full-time working men under age 35 without a bachelor's degree who are union members are9 percentage points more likely to be married, 6.3 percentage points more likely to have children, and 10.1 percentage points more likely to own a home than their nonunion peers.
"Young men want the financial security to build a life, support a family, and own a home, and unions can help make those goals more attainable," said Aurelia Glass, policy analyst for the American Worker Project at CAP and author of the analysis. "Union jobs provide young men, especially working-class young men, with higher wages, better benefits, and a stronger voice at work. Many young men feel like financial stability is slipping further and further out of reach. Strengthening workers' freedom to organize can give more of them a real pathway to get ahead, and it's something young men support."
Among the analysis' key findings:
* Working-class union men are more likely to get married. Among young men without college degrees, 34.5 percent of union members are married compared with 25.5 percent of nonunion workers, a gap of 9 percentage points. Nearly 35 percent of union men under age 35 across education levels are married, compared with 28.8 percent of nonunion men.
* Working-class union men are more likely to have children. Among young men without a bachelor's degree, 31.5 percent of union members have at least one of their own children living in their household compared to 25.2 percent for nonunion men, a difference of 6.3 percentage points. Twenty-eight percent of young union men across education levels have their own children living in their household, compared with 22.4 percent of nonunion men.
* Working-class union men are more likely to own a home. Among young men without college degrees, union members are 10.1 percentage points more likely to be homeowners: 61.5 percent of male union members under age 35 without a bachelor's degree own their own home, compared with 51.3 percent of nonunion young men. Nearly 60 percent of union men across education levels under age 35 own their homes, compared with 51 percent of nonunion men.
* Unions provide a significant economic boost for young men. Previous research found a 17.6 percent union wage premium for men under age 35, and young union members are also substantially more likely to receive employer-provided health insurance and retirement benefits.
* Young men want greater access to unions. According to recent polling, 55 percent of men under age 30 say they would support unionizing their workplace, and 64 percent of young men in union households describe themselves as financially stable, compared with 46 percent of those outside union households. CAP polling finds that among voters, 63 percent of men under age 35 support making it easier to unionize. Yet just 6 percent of private sector workers currently belong to unions.
* Financial stability remains out of reach for many young men. Recent surveys found that just 45 percent of men under age 30 say they feel "financially stable," and although 63 percent say "[h]aving children is important to [them]," only 57 percent believe they "will be able to afford to raise children in the near future."
Read the analysis: "How Unions Help Young Working-Class Men Buy Homes and Start Families" (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-unions-help-young-working-class-men-buy-homes-and-start-families/) by Aurelia Glass
For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, please contact Christian Unkenholz at cunkenholz@americanprogress.org.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-unions-help-working-class-young-men-reach-major-life-milestones/
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: AI Industry Is Coalescing on 'Pacing the Frontier.' Will It Actually Change Anything?
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary:
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The AI Industry Is Coalescing on "Pacing the Frontier." Will It Actually Change Anything?
Commentary by Aalok Mehta
September 17, 2026
On September 12, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a bleak 3800-word essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." The essay outlines fears of catastrophic risks from AI and announced that the company would take unilateral action to embed third-party evaluators (such as the organization METR) internally. The essay comes just days after concerns ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * The AI Industry Is Coalescing on "Pacing the Frontier." Will It Actually Change Anything? Commentary by Aalok Mehta September 17, 2026 On September 12, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a bleak 3800-word essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." The essay outlines fears of catastrophic risks from AI and announced that the company would take unilateral action to embed third-party evaluators (such as the organization METR) internally. The essay comes just days after concernsover the growing cyber capabilities of AI models burst out of the Silicon Valley bubble. A series of autonomous hacking incidents by AI agents was the dry kindling; a viral resignation post by an Anthropic researcher was the spark, garnering more than 172 million views and catapulting talks of extreme risks from the fringe to mainstream news broadcasts, the halls of Capitol Hill, and dinner tables across the country. By the end of the weekend, AI policy had seemingly reached an inflection point, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreeing to take similar steps to Anthropic and Elon Musk, who heads his own AI company, endorsing Dario's analysis.
But durable change for the AI industry--and policymakers that want to oversee it--faces long odds. Optimism that the new consensus would lead to significant AI policy change has given way to opposition from the president, vice president, China, industry players, and others. For the proposal to create lasting impact, at least four things need to happen:
1. Labs must work out difficult implementation details and conflict of interest issues for independent evaluators.
2. Safety considerations must expand beyond catastrophic risks to encompass the full range of potential harms from AI.
3. The federal government must create robust oversight mechanisms for AI labs that avoid concerns about regulatory capture.
4. The United States and China must make progress on baseline AI governance issues.
A failure in any of these areas will make a return to the status quo that much more likely.
From Mythos to METR: AI Risk Moves into the Mainstream
The roots of Amodei's essay trace back as far as April 2026, when Anthropic previewed Mythos, a model with cyber capabilities so powerful that the company decided not to release it publicly, only providing access through a trusted-partner program known as Glasswing. OpenAI later took a similar limited release approach with one of its cyber capable models, GPT-5.4-Cyber.
Limited release, however, was not enough to protect the internet from AI agents. Beginning in mid-July, companies started reporting that AI agents undergoing cyber testing--including unreleased models--had found their way to the open internet and hacked multiple websites. The first incident, reported by Hugging Face, was eventually traced to two OpenAI models. Anthropic and Meta then publicly disclosed their own set of agentic AI hacking incidents, uncovered during retrospective reviews prompted by the Hugging Face breach. Subsequently, researchers discovered that OpenAI agents used more than 10 websites as unauthorized message boards, including a German wiki, and hacked the RubyGems package manager website prior to the Hugging Face breach; Anthropic also disclosed a fourth hacking incident.
So, by the time Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation on September 8, both AI insiders and the public were already primed for concern. Coxon stated: "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Subsequent comments suggest that these concerns are not unique within the AI industry. For example, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, said: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."
The Pacing the Frontier Proposal
Amodei's essay came just days after Coxon's announcement and an ensuing press tour, which saw Coxon interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN, NBC, and other outlets. The shift in AI thinking felt immediate. Numerous lawmakers--including Illinois Governor JB Pritzker; Senators Bernie Sanders, Mark Kelly, Ted Cruz, Patty Murray, and Ruben Gallego; and House Speaker Mike Johnson--weighed in, while OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane published an essay a day later titled "The AI policy window is open. We need to act" outlining the company's policy priorities.
Nothing in Lehane's essay, however, was as costly or disruptive as the first of Amodei's three policy ideas. He said that Anthropic is unilaterally committing to embedding third-party evaluators into its infrastructure, who would be issued desks in Anthropic's offices, access badges, and company laptops. "These embedded evaluators should have ongoing access to permissions and tools similar to those of internal employees who do comparable risk assessments," he wrote. OpenAI has seemingly committed to this as well.
Amodei makes two other major recommendations. He advocates that "frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress," noting that this might require narrow exemptions from antitrust law. And he brings up global coordination, calling for the United States and other democratic governments to coordinate with "authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance."
The Challenges of Pacing the Frontier
Polling continues to show that Americans are deeply skeptical about the benefits of AI technology and the vast majority want the government to regulate it. The recent cyber incidents are only likely to heighten those concerns. However, despite praise from some industry insiders, Amodei's proposals have received significant pushback over concerns of fearmongering and regulatory capture--including President Trump claiming that "[t]here is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China"--highlighting continued unease from the administration about the impacts of regulation on the ability to compete with China.
Yet there are steps that can help alleviate some of those concerns and help create lasting, durable oversight of frontier AI capabilities and labs. Getting there requires at least four major lines of effort from the U.S. government.
1. Build trust in embedded evaluators. On-site, permanent evaluation teams are not a novel concept; they are used in other industries, most notably the financial sector and certain large defense contractors. However, a variety of complex issues must be solved before such evaluators can achieve their intended purpose. These include selecting evaluators with the appropriate level of technical expertise, navigating how to provide evaluators as much access as possible without compromising sensitive intellectual property, ensuring that evaluators take appropriate steps to secure their work, making internal resources and staff available to evaluators, and managing how findings from evaluators will be communicated and to whom. Labs must resolve ethical issues and ensure that evaluators are performing substantive analysis not just of models, but also of the infrastructure, management, processes, and procedures that surround them.
Perhaps the most important issue, however, is ensuring that evaluators are--and are considered by the public and governments to be--truly independent. For example, Amodei's mention of METR has garnered significant criticism over circular flows of staff and money between Anthropic, philanthropy, and external evaluation organizations, including from former White House AI czar David Sacks. Even the appearance of impropriety would undermine the impact of this tool.
2. Address real-world as well as catastrophic harms. The pacing proposal has also been criticized for its focus on theoretical catastrophic harms and for extrapolating unrealistic scenarios. These potentially large-scale disasters consume the thinking of significant parts of Silicon Valley. But AI is already causing real-world harms--including the proliferation of deepfakes and misinformation, harm to children's safety, and suicidal ideation--and these contemporary ills drive a large part of the public anxiety about AI, even in an era of autonomous cyber agent breakouts. Perhaps most importantly, anxiety about the impact of AI on jobs is increasing as companies cite AI as justification for layoffs, and early evidence suggests potential impacts on entry-level roles.
If the justification for pacing the frontier is to buy time for labs and society to adjust to the impacts of AI and steer it in more productive ways, then evaluations and evaluators cannot focus only on a subset--albeit an important subset--of AI risks. They must also examine impacts on task automation, mental health, and other areas where AI is already causing real-world harm.
3. Set the rules of the road and hold powerful companies to account. Labs do not need permission to pace the frontier; they can stop or pause training at any time (as OpenAI has temporarily done), just as they can bring in external evaluators of their own volition. However, unilateral action creates issues; the labs that slow down or focus on safety may be outcompeted by the most risk-taking firms. This is where the federal government can and should step in. It can not only outline a floor that all companies must meet, but also establish standards and guidelines that build trust in evaluators, ensure consistent auditing standards, and allow for comparability across labs. The competition law on deep cooperation over safety standards is ambiguous--which likely underlies Anthropic's exemption request--but this does not mean that the U.S. government should provide antitrust waivers or implicitly bless a handful of companies to work out standards for the entire industry. This would only feed claims that AI companies are using scare tactics and fearmongering to obtain beneficial regulation and strangle potential competitors.
AI is too important to leave solely to self-policing. Rather than watching from a distance, the federal government should actively convene and shape standards development within and among labs. A regulatory or statutory backstop is the only way to ensure that public voices are also part of the conversation--it would help bridge some of the AI trust gap and provide a regulatory framework that the United States could leverage internationally. Nor does it mean that the federal government should give broad safe harbors to AI labs; any new rules should ensure that AI labs remain accountable under existing liability, intellectual property, consumer protection, and other laws to (1) avoid the perception of regulatory capture and (2) ensure ongoing and robust incentives to release safe products and conduct research and development responsibly.
4. Coordinate with China on a narrow set of issues. Chinese policymakers are concerned about some of the same risks as U.S. industry, especially around autonomous agents. However, even as Anthropic's leadership pushes for cooperation with "authoritarian states," they are also making claims that China is distilling U.S. models at scale and committing to robust release of open-weight models that may pose irreversible risks once they are out in the wild. This sets any potential discussion of AI rules of the road on the back foot, with China pushing back against U.S. "fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition." As the United States and China enter their September summit with AI at top of mind, there is a chance to talk through basic definitional issues and come to agreement on a mutual approach to pacing regulation--but only if the discussions are not poisoned by escalatory rhetoric in the preceding days.
Coming to an agreement does not, and should not, mean undermining the ability of U.S. and Chinese labs to compete on price and capability, nor does it require submitting U.S. companies to foreign inspection. Rather, the United States and China can find common ground--or at least develop a roadmap for further discussions--that focuses on establishing a common understanding of safety and risk and sharing critical information. Given ongoing tensions, trust between the United States and China will likely be nonexistent, so verification methods and tools will be vital to ensure that countries are upholding their commitments.
AI is advancing at a dizzying pace, and it is overwhelming the institutions society has put into place to manage rapid change. Pacing the frontier may have costs, such as delaying the development of lifesaving new drugs, but it also may prevent even bigger costs related to large-scale economic damage, loss of life, and further erosions in public trust. But without coordinated efforts by stakeholders in these four areas, this moment of industry consensus and momentum is unlikely to shift the current trajectory of AI development.
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Aalok Mehta is director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
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Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/ai-industry-coalescing-pacing-frontier-will-it-actually-change-anything
[Category: ThinkTank]
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The AI Industry Is Coalescing on "Pacing the Frontier." Will It Actually Change Anything?
Commentary by Aalok Mehta
September 17, 2026
On September 12, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a bleak 3800-word essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." The essay outlines fears of catastrophic risks from AI and announced that the company would take unilateral action to embed third-party evaluators (such as the organization METR) internally. The essay comes just days after concerns ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * The AI Industry Is Coalescing on "Pacing the Frontier." Will It Actually Change Anything? Commentary by Aalok Mehta September 17, 2026 On September 12, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a bleak 3800-word essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." The essay outlines fears of catastrophic risks from AI and announced that the company would take unilateral action to embed third-party evaluators (such as the organization METR) internally. The essay comes just days after concernsover the growing cyber capabilities of AI models burst out of the Silicon Valley bubble. A series of autonomous hacking incidents by AI agents was the dry kindling; a viral resignation post by an Anthropic researcher was the spark, garnering more than 172 million views and catapulting talks of extreme risks from the fringe to mainstream news broadcasts, the halls of Capitol Hill, and dinner tables across the country. By the end of the weekend, AI policy had seemingly reached an inflection point, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreeing to take similar steps to Anthropic and Elon Musk, who heads his own AI company, endorsing Dario's analysis.
But durable change for the AI industry--and policymakers that want to oversee it--faces long odds. Optimism that the new consensus would lead to significant AI policy change has given way to opposition from the president, vice president, China, industry players, and others. For the proposal to create lasting impact, at least four things need to happen:
1. Labs must work out difficult implementation details and conflict of interest issues for independent evaluators.
2. Safety considerations must expand beyond catastrophic risks to encompass the full range of potential harms from AI.
3. The federal government must create robust oversight mechanisms for AI labs that avoid concerns about regulatory capture.
4. The United States and China must make progress on baseline AI governance issues.
A failure in any of these areas will make a return to the status quo that much more likely.
From Mythos to METR: AI Risk Moves into the Mainstream
The roots of Amodei's essay trace back as far as April 2026, when Anthropic previewed Mythos, a model with cyber capabilities so powerful that the company decided not to release it publicly, only providing access through a trusted-partner program known as Glasswing. OpenAI later took a similar limited release approach with one of its cyber capable models, GPT-5.4-Cyber.
Limited release, however, was not enough to protect the internet from AI agents. Beginning in mid-July, companies started reporting that AI agents undergoing cyber testing--including unreleased models--had found their way to the open internet and hacked multiple websites. The first incident, reported by Hugging Face, was eventually traced to two OpenAI models. Anthropic and Meta then publicly disclosed their own set of agentic AI hacking incidents, uncovered during retrospective reviews prompted by the Hugging Face breach. Subsequently, researchers discovered that OpenAI agents used more than 10 websites as unauthorized message boards, including a German wiki, and hacked the RubyGems package manager website prior to the Hugging Face breach; Anthropic also disclosed a fourth hacking incident.
So, by the time Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation on September 8, both AI insiders and the public were already primed for concern. Coxon stated: "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Subsequent comments suggest that these concerns are not unique within the AI industry. For example, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, said: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."
The Pacing the Frontier Proposal
Amodei's essay came just days after Coxon's announcement and an ensuing press tour, which saw Coxon interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN, NBC, and other outlets. The shift in AI thinking felt immediate. Numerous lawmakers--including Illinois Governor JB Pritzker; Senators Bernie Sanders, Mark Kelly, Ted Cruz, Patty Murray, and Ruben Gallego; and House Speaker Mike Johnson--weighed in, while OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane published an essay a day later titled "The AI policy window is open. We need to act" outlining the company's policy priorities.
Nothing in Lehane's essay, however, was as costly or disruptive as the first of Amodei's three policy ideas. He said that Anthropic is unilaterally committing to embedding third-party evaluators into its infrastructure, who would be issued desks in Anthropic's offices, access badges, and company laptops. "These embedded evaluators should have ongoing access to permissions and tools similar to those of internal employees who do comparable risk assessments," he wrote. OpenAI has seemingly committed to this as well.
Amodei makes two other major recommendations. He advocates that "frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress," noting that this might require narrow exemptions from antitrust law. And he brings up global coordination, calling for the United States and other democratic governments to coordinate with "authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance."
The Challenges of Pacing the Frontier
Polling continues to show that Americans are deeply skeptical about the benefits of AI technology and the vast majority want the government to regulate it. The recent cyber incidents are only likely to heighten those concerns. However, despite praise from some industry insiders, Amodei's proposals have received significant pushback over concerns of fearmongering and regulatory capture--including President Trump claiming that "[t]here is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China"--highlighting continued unease from the administration about the impacts of regulation on the ability to compete with China.
Yet there are steps that can help alleviate some of those concerns and help create lasting, durable oversight of frontier AI capabilities and labs. Getting there requires at least four major lines of effort from the U.S. government.
1. Build trust in embedded evaluators. On-site, permanent evaluation teams are not a novel concept; they are used in other industries, most notably the financial sector and certain large defense contractors. However, a variety of complex issues must be solved before such evaluators can achieve their intended purpose. These include selecting evaluators with the appropriate level of technical expertise, navigating how to provide evaluators as much access as possible without compromising sensitive intellectual property, ensuring that evaluators take appropriate steps to secure their work, making internal resources and staff available to evaluators, and managing how findings from evaluators will be communicated and to whom. Labs must resolve ethical issues and ensure that evaluators are performing substantive analysis not just of models, but also of the infrastructure, management, processes, and procedures that surround them.
Perhaps the most important issue, however, is ensuring that evaluators are--and are considered by the public and governments to be--truly independent. For example, Amodei's mention of METR has garnered significant criticism over circular flows of staff and money between Anthropic, philanthropy, and external evaluation organizations, including from former White House AI czar David Sacks. Even the appearance of impropriety would undermine the impact of this tool.
2. Address real-world as well as catastrophic harms. The pacing proposal has also been criticized for its focus on theoretical catastrophic harms and for extrapolating unrealistic scenarios. These potentially large-scale disasters consume the thinking of significant parts of Silicon Valley. But AI is already causing real-world harms--including the proliferation of deepfakes and misinformation, harm to children's safety, and suicidal ideation--and these contemporary ills drive a large part of the public anxiety about AI, even in an era of autonomous cyber agent breakouts. Perhaps most importantly, anxiety about the impact of AI on jobs is increasing as companies cite AI as justification for layoffs, and early evidence suggests potential impacts on entry-level roles.
If the justification for pacing the frontier is to buy time for labs and society to adjust to the impacts of AI and steer it in more productive ways, then evaluations and evaluators cannot focus only on a subset--albeit an important subset--of AI risks. They must also examine impacts on task automation, mental health, and other areas where AI is already causing real-world harm.
3. Set the rules of the road and hold powerful companies to account. Labs do not need permission to pace the frontier; they can stop or pause training at any time (as OpenAI has temporarily done), just as they can bring in external evaluators of their own volition. However, unilateral action creates issues; the labs that slow down or focus on safety may be outcompeted by the most risk-taking firms. This is where the federal government can and should step in. It can not only outline a floor that all companies must meet, but also establish standards and guidelines that build trust in evaluators, ensure consistent auditing standards, and allow for comparability across labs. The competition law on deep cooperation over safety standards is ambiguous--which likely underlies Anthropic's exemption request--but this does not mean that the U.S. government should provide antitrust waivers or implicitly bless a handful of companies to work out standards for the entire industry. This would only feed claims that AI companies are using scare tactics and fearmongering to obtain beneficial regulation and strangle potential competitors.
AI is too important to leave solely to self-policing. Rather than watching from a distance, the federal government should actively convene and shape standards development within and among labs. A regulatory or statutory backstop is the only way to ensure that public voices are also part of the conversation--it would help bridge some of the AI trust gap and provide a regulatory framework that the United States could leverage internationally. Nor does it mean that the federal government should give broad safe harbors to AI labs; any new rules should ensure that AI labs remain accountable under existing liability, intellectual property, consumer protection, and other laws to (1) avoid the perception of regulatory capture and (2) ensure ongoing and robust incentives to release safe products and conduct research and development responsibly.
4. Coordinate with China on a narrow set of issues. Chinese policymakers are concerned about some of the same risks as U.S. industry, especially around autonomous agents. However, even as Anthropic's leadership pushes for cooperation with "authoritarian states," they are also making claims that China is distilling U.S. models at scale and committing to robust release of open-weight models that may pose irreversible risks once they are out in the wild. This sets any potential discussion of AI rules of the road on the back foot, with China pushing back against U.S. "fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition." As the United States and China enter their September summit with AI at top of mind, there is a chance to talk through basic definitional issues and come to agreement on a mutual approach to pacing regulation--but only if the discussions are not poisoned by escalatory rhetoric in the preceding days.
Coming to an agreement does not, and should not, mean undermining the ability of U.S. and Chinese labs to compete on price and capability, nor does it require submitting U.S. companies to foreign inspection. Rather, the United States and China can find common ground--or at least develop a roadmap for further discussions--that focuses on establishing a common understanding of safety and risk and sharing critical information. Given ongoing tensions, trust between the United States and China will likely be nonexistent, so verification methods and tools will be vital to ensure that countries are upholding their commitments.
AI is advancing at a dizzying pace, and it is overwhelming the institutions society has put into place to manage rapid change. Pacing the frontier may have costs, such as delaying the development of lifesaving new drugs, but it also may prevent even bigger costs related to large-scale economic damage, loss of life, and further erosions in public trust. But without coordinated efforts by stakeholders in these four areas, this moment of industry consensus and momentum is unlikely to shift the current trajectory of AI development.
* * *
Aalok Mehta is director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/ai-industry-coalescing-pacing-frontier-will-it-actually-change-anything
[Category: ThinkTank]
CAP Announces Viviann Anguiano as VP of Higher Education and Economic Mobility
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release:
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Sep 17, 2026
CAP Announces Viviann Anguiano as VP of Higher Education and Economic Mobility
Washington, D.C. -- Today, the Center for American Progress announced that Viviann Anguiano has been tapped to serve as vice president of Higher Education and Economic Mobility. In this role, she will lead CAP's research and policy agenda on economic mobility and expanding opportunity through higher education and workforce policy.
"Viviann has done high-impact work throughout her career to ensure real educational ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release: * * * Sep 17, 2026 CAP Announces Viviann Anguiano as VP of Higher Education and Economic Mobility Washington, D.C. -- Today, the Center for American Progress announced that Viviann Anguiano has been tapped to serve as vice president of Higher Education and Economic Mobility. In this role, she will lead CAP's research and policy agenda on economic mobility and expanding opportunity through higher education and workforce policy. "Viviann has done high-impact work throughout her career to ensure real educationalopportunities for people going to college or pursuing a career," said Neera Tanden, president and CEO at CAP. "We are thrilled that she is taking on this expanded role at CAP to drive a new agenda on higher education and workforce issues for the future."
Anguiano joined CAP in 2025 as the managing director of Higher Education Policy, bringing more than 15 years of leadership experience across a range of policy issues in expanding economic opportunity at the highest levels of government, national and community-based nonprofits, and educational institutions.
"Our work ahead must not only protect education as a fundamental right in a functioning democracy but transform it so that all people can have prosperous lives," said Anguiano. "I look forward to building on CAP's work to make that a reality."
Prior to her time at CAP, Anguiano served in the White House Domestic Policy Council as the director of education to President Joe Biden. In this role, she championed the administration's historic higher education achievements, including lowering costs and supporting financial stability for more than 5 million Americans.
Prior to her appointment in the executive branch, Anguiano's experience includes serving on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee as the deputy director of education to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and as senior policy adviser to Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). She also helped found Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago, a trailblazing institution designed to serve first-generation and low-income students.
For more information or to speak with an expert, contact Mishka Espey at eespey@americanprogress.org.
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Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-cap-announces-viviann-anguiano-as-vp-of-higher-education-and-economic-mobility/
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Sep 17, 2026
CAP Announces Viviann Anguiano as VP of Higher Education and Economic Mobility
Washington, D.C. -- Today, the Center for American Progress announced that Viviann Anguiano has been tapped to serve as vice president of Higher Education and Economic Mobility. In this role, she will lead CAP's research and policy agenda on economic mobility and expanding opportunity through higher education and workforce policy.
"Viviann has done high-impact work throughout her career to ensure real educational ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release: * * * Sep 17, 2026 CAP Announces Viviann Anguiano as VP of Higher Education and Economic Mobility Washington, D.C. -- Today, the Center for American Progress announced that Viviann Anguiano has been tapped to serve as vice president of Higher Education and Economic Mobility. In this role, she will lead CAP's research and policy agenda on economic mobility and expanding opportunity through higher education and workforce policy. "Viviann has done high-impact work throughout her career to ensure real educationalopportunities for people going to college or pursuing a career," said Neera Tanden, president and CEO at CAP. "We are thrilled that she is taking on this expanded role at CAP to drive a new agenda on higher education and workforce issues for the future."
Anguiano joined CAP in 2025 as the managing director of Higher Education Policy, bringing more than 15 years of leadership experience across a range of policy issues in expanding economic opportunity at the highest levels of government, national and community-based nonprofits, and educational institutions.
"Our work ahead must not only protect education as a fundamental right in a functioning democracy but transform it so that all people can have prosperous lives," said Anguiano. "I look forward to building on CAP's work to make that a reality."
Prior to her time at CAP, Anguiano served in the White House Domestic Policy Council as the director of education to President Joe Biden. In this role, she championed the administration's historic higher education achievements, including lowering costs and supporting financial stability for more than 5 million Americans.
Prior to her appointment in the executive branch, Anguiano's experience includes serving on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee as the deputy director of education to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and as senior policy adviser to Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). She also helped found Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago, a trailblazing institution designed to serve first-generation and low-income students.
For more information or to speak with an expert, contact Mishka Espey at eespey@americanprogress.org.
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Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-cap-announces-viviann-anguiano-as-vp-of-higher-education-and-economic-mobility/
[Category: ThinkTank]