About the project

The project studies how local governments develop the ability to inventory, procure, evaluate, oversee, and contest AI systems before deployment. Local governments face a distinctive version of the AI governance problem. They rarely build systems themselves; they acquire them through procurement, inherit them through vendor updates, and encounter them through staff adoption. Their decisions directly affect residents' benefits, permits, records, and interactions with public safety. And they must do all of this with limited specialized staff.

The materials on this site — the inventory template, procurement checklist, risk tier classifier, state guides, and readiness assessment — are designed to be adapted by any city, regardless of size, and to work within existing administrative structures: procurement offices, city attorney review, records management, and council oversight.

This project is not a vendor, law firm, or lobbying organization. It is a public-interest policy and research project. The focus is on implementation capacity: inventories, procurement review, risk classification, public transparency, human review, incident response, and resident accountability.