Political Salon hosted by Action Labs as a part of #SFTechWeek
What if AI could be more than a threat to democracy—and instead become a powerful tool for strengthening it?
In this interactive two-hour session, we’ll explore practical ways ordinary people can use AI to become more informed, make government more transparent, organize communities, hold powerful institutions accountable, and make their voices heard. Through hands-on activities and small-group challenges, participants will experiment with using AI to understand complex...
Book talk by Jane VaynmanAssistant Professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Johns Hopkins University
Co-sponsors: Berkeley Institute of Security and Governance, Berkeley Risk and Security Lab
Why do adversaries sometimes cooperate to restrain their military competition? Why do they design arms control agreements with intrusive verification in some cases but rely on minimal transparency in others? Amidst ongoing international competition, arms control remains rare despite potential mutual...
Sakina is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on how citizen state relationships change with the proliferation of technology in welfare service delivery in South Asia.
She holds a Masters in International Development Policy from Duke University, a Masters in Public Policy & a Bachelors in Economics from University of Mumbai. In the past she has worked as a researcher with LibTech India, an organization focused on improving public service delivery, in collaboration with several...
Eddie Chu is a junior majoring in Legal Studies, focusing on Law, Rights, and Social Change, with a minor in Public Policy. As a Research Apprentice with the Institute of International Studies (IIS), he assists with news monitoring in Myanmar. He investigates the humanitarian crisis, economic and social conditions, and the Rohingya crisis, organizing the most important and relevant news for international policymakers. Eddie previously worked as a fact-checker intern with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (...
Yue Lin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Political Economy.
In the dissertation, Yue studies an extreme version of economic de-globalization: the rising trend of advanced democracies leveraging national security to restrict multinational enterprises from both emerging and established markets. She documents the political origins of this growing trend in U.S. Congress, and the socio-political strategies multinational corporations adopt to mitigate geopolitical risks. Her dissertation received the...
With Quinn Slobodian, Professor of International History, Boston University, and Ben Tarnoff, Journalist
To understand Elon Musk and the world he intends to make, we have to understand the worlds that made him. So argue historian Quinn Slobodian and journalist Ben Tarnoff in their highly anticipated new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.
April 09, 2026| 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM|820 Social Sciences BuildingCloud Capitalism and the AI TransitionWith Kathy Thelen, Ford Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Join MIT political scientist Kathy Thelen at BESI as she explores the origins and implications of the new cloud business model powering the AI boom. She’ll elaborate on how this model differs from the traditional platform model out of which it grew, as well as the technological, political, and distributional impacts of the rise of this new business model. She...
The U.S. War on Iran has drawn widespread attention to the influence of AI and data science tools on military choices previously left to human judgement. At...
China looms large in US conversations about AI policy. But often the stories that spread about Chinese AI are oversimplified—"China is poised to overtake the US in the AI race," "DeepSeek proved that chip export controls have failed," "AI is one area where the US and China should obviously cooperate." Since reality is usually more complicated, this talk, featuring Helen Toner (Georgetown CSET) in conversation with...
