Dominant approaches to explainability in AI emphasise post hoc technical transparency, overlooking the socio-technical contexts in which systems are developed, deployed, and experienced. This paper argues that beginning AI adoption processes with Question Zero (Q0), “Should we adopt an AI system in the first place?”, reframes explainability as an essential requirement across the entire AI lifecycle rather than a narrow compliance task. Q0 challenges entrenched techno-solutionist assumptions that position AI as the default or best option, encouraging early integration of considerations of explainability in system design. By foregrounding this, Q0 shifts explainability towards purpose aligned, stakeholder aware forms that move beyond generic model centred outputs. Further, the paper reflects on how explainability can also strengthen Q0 by providing tools to assess the proportionality of AI adoption, clarify problem framing, and make visible the alternatives excluded during design. Taken together, these dual perspectives, Q0 for explainability and explainability for Q0, offer multidimensional opportunities for enhancing explainability. The paper illustrates this argument through reflection on the need, and value of, applying QO in the context of the European Commission’s Apply AI Strategy.

Welcome to the ninth edition of the AI Index report. As AI continues to advance rapidly, the question becomes whether the systems built around it can keep up. Governance frameworks, evaluation methods, education systems, and the data infrastructure needed to track AI's impact are struggling to match the pace of the technology itself. That gap between what AI can do and how prepared we are to manage it runs through every chapter of this year's report. New in this edition, the report tracks how AI is being tested more ambitiously across reasoning, safety, and real-world task execution, and why those measurements are increasingly difficult to rely on. It also features new estimates of generative AI's economic value alongside emerging evidence of its labor market effects, an analytical framework on AI sovereignty, and a science chapter developed in collaboration with Schmidt Sciences. For the first time, the report features standalone chapters on AI in science and AI in medicine, reflecting AI's growing impact across these two domains.

Collective endorsement of shared values across diverse social groups is essential for the development and sustainability of democratic societies, yet capturing the perspectives of marginalised populations remains a persistent challenge, particularly when examined through ethical, legal, and social (ELS) lenses. This study develops a structured Migration ELS taxonomy to guide a GenAI-assisted semantic classification model designed to identify ELS dimensions in textual data. The model is fine-tuned and evaluated within a human-in-the-loop framework using expert annotations to ensure reliability and interpretive accuracy. As an empirical case, the approach is applied to migration-related official policy documents and narratives of Ukrainian migrants published on the Telegram platform. The resulting framework enables the analysis of alignment between governmental and migrant perspectives, revealing thematic and temporal divergences in ELS dimensions across institutional and user-generated discourse. The findings demonstrate the potential of this scalable framework, which combines taxonomy-driven modelling with generative AI and expert-in-the-loop validation, to reveal patterns of alignment and temporal dynamics in the representation of values across different social groups.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems increasingly permeate sensitive domains such as finance, healthcare, and media, ensuring their ethical deployment has become a central concern for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Current auditing tools often assess isolated principles, such as fairness or explainability, lacking a comprehensive view of the ethical risks involved. This paper presents a multidimensional framework for ethical evaluation of AI systems, designed to support responsible AI governance and alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The proposed approach enables the simultaneous analysis of key ethical dimensions, including fairness, bias, explainability, robustness, transparency, and legal compliance. We demonstrate the applicability of this tool through one extensive case study: a credit scoring system, considered high-risk under the AI Act. This work contributes to operationalizing responsible AI governance, providing insight for policymakers, regulators, and practitioners to ensure ethical, legally compliant, and socially responsible AI deployment.

As AI systems become increasingly autonomous and embedded in socio-technical environments, balancing innovation with social responsibility grows increasingly urgent. Multi-agent systems and autonomous agents offer valuable insights into decision-making, coordination, and adaptability, yet their deployment raises critical ethical and governance challenges. How can we ensure that AI aligns with human values, operates transparently, and remains accountable within complex social and economic ecosystems? This talk explores the intersection of AI ethics, governance, and agent-based perspectives, drawing on my work in AI policy and governance, as well as prior research on agents, agent organizations, formal models, and decision-making frameworks [6,7]. Recent advancements are reshaping AI not just as a technology but as a socio-technical process that functions in dynamic, multistakeholder environments. As such, addressing accountability, normative reasoning, and value alignment requires a multidisciplinary approach [2]. A central focus of this talk is the role of governance structures, regulatory mechanisms, and institutional oversight in ensuring AI remains both trustworthy and adaptable. Drawing on recent AI policy research [1], I will examine strategies for embedding ethical constraints in AI design, the role of explainability in agent decision-making, and how multi-agent coordination informs regulatory compliance. Rather than viewing regulation as a barrier, will show that responsible governance is an enabler of sustainable innovation, driving public trust, business differentiation, and long-term technological progress [4]. By integrating insights from agent-based modeling, AI policy frameworks, and governance strategies, this talk underscores the importance of designing AI systems that are both socially responsible and technically robust [5,3]. Ultimately, ensuring AI serves the common good requires a multidisciplinary approach-one that combines formal models, ethical considerations, and adaptive policy mechanisms to create AI systems that are accountable, fair, and aligned with human values.

This paper examines the European Commission’s “AI First” strategy, arguing that it places acceleration and economic competitiveness above democratic values, societal benefit, and human-centric innovation. While substantial investment in AI is welcome when it promotes sustainable, equitable, and responsible innovation, the authors warn that policy is shifting from governance to unchecked deployment, risking fragmentation, dependency, and misaligned priorities. Rather than asking how AI can be applied, the paper urges policymakers to ask why, advocating a “People First” approach grounded in societal needs, digital sovereignty, and responsible innovation. The authors argue that Europe’s AI leadership should be shaped not by speed, but by principled direction, inclusivity, and a commitment to long-term public value.

We consider a type of information-seeking dialogue between a seeker agent and a respondent agent, where the seeker estimates the respondent to not be willing to share a particular set of sought-after information. Hence, the seeker postpones (hides) its goal topic, related to the respondent's sensitive information, until the respondent is perceived as willing to talk about it. In the intermediate process, the seeker opens other topics to steer the dialogue tactfully towards the goal. Such dialogue strategies, which we refer to as goal-hiding strategies, are common in diverse contexts such as criminal interrogations and medical assessments, involving sensitive topics. Conversely, in malicious online interactions like social media extortion, similar strategies might aim to manipulate individuals into revealing information or agreeing to unfavorable terms. This paper proposes a formal dialogue framework for understanding goal-hiding strategies. The dialogue framework uses Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks (QBAFs) to assign willingness scores to topics. An initial willingness for each topic is modified by considering how topics promote (support) or demote (attack) other topics. We introduce a method to identify relations among topics by considering a respondent's shared information. Finally, we introduce a gradual semantics to estimate changes in willingness as new topics are opened. Our formal analysis and empirical evaluation show the system's compliance with privacy-preserving safety properties. A formal understanding of goal-hiding strategies opens up a range of practical applications; For instance, a seeker agent may plan with goal-hiding to enhance privacy in human-agent interactions. Similarly, an observer agent (third-party) may be designed to enhance social media security by detecting goal-hiding strategies employed by users' interlocutors.

The "right to contest" decisions that have consequences on individuals or the society is a well-established democratic right. Contesting a decision is not a matter of simply providing an explanation, but rather of assessing whether the decision and the explanation are permissible against an organization's governance framework. Yet, albeit the popularity of adjacent fields, little work has been explicitly done on contesting AI decisions. In this paper, we propose that formal argumentation can be used to formulate contestations of decisions made by artificial agents. We extend the discourse on socio-ethical values in AI by conceptualizing our argumentation framework as a formal dialogue, enabling the interaction between humans and agents as decisions are being contested.

Human-AI coevolution, defined as a process in which humans and AI algorithms continuously influence each other, increasingly characterises our society, but is understudied in artificial intelligence and complexity science literature. Recommender systems and assistants play a prominent role in human-AI coevolution, as they permeate many facets of daily life and influence human choices through online platforms. The interaction between users and AI results in a potentially endless feedback loop, wherein users' choices generate data to train AI models, which, in turn, shape subsequent user preferences. This human-AI feedback loop has peculiar characteristics compared to traditional human-machine interaction and gives rise to complex and often “unintended” systemic outcomes. This paper introduces human-AI coevolution as the cornerstone for a new field of study at the intersection between AI and complexity science focused on the theoretical, empirical, and mathematical investigation of the human-AI feedback loop. In doing so, we: (i) outline the pros and cons of existing methodologies and highlight shortcomings and potential ways for capturing feedback loop mechanisms; (ii) propose a reflection at the intersection between complexity science, AI and society; (iii) provide real-world examples for different human-AI ecosystems; and (iv) illustrate challenges to the creation of such a field of study, conceptualising them at increasing levels of abstraction, i.e., scientific, legal and socio-political.

As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves rapidly, the urgency to govern it responsibly becomes more pressing by the day. We are standing at a pivotal moment, one where the choices we make today will shape not just technological outcomes, but also the foundations of our societies, economies, and planetary well-being.

Contemporary AI policy is dominated by hegemonic neoliberal ideology, embedding assumptions of individualism, rationality, and market fundamentalism into its regulatory frameworks. This is evident in major policy efforts (e.g., the EU AI Act or the OECD principles) which prioritize economic growth and innovation over justice, equity, and collective welfare, and in the current policy landscape that favors market incentives and private sector leadership while sidelining democratic control and structural critique. This paper questions these prevailing paradigms and exposes how they reflect and reinforce capitalist power structures through corporate lobbying, the pursuit of specific kinds of AI models motivated primarily by usefulness to capital, and the externalization of social and environmental costs. We argue that effective AI governance must confront, rather than accommodate, capitalist interests. Drawing on legal and political theory, we propose an explicitly anti-capitalist approach to AI policy, that centers on social well-being, redistributive justice, and democratic control over technological infrastructures. In doing so, we outline essential counter-balancing policy approaches to reclaim AI governance from capitalistic capture and advance just and sustainable technology futures.

At a time when the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions precipitously, artificial intelligence (AI) brings large opportunities and large risks. To address its uncertain environmental impact, we propose the ‘Earth alignment’ principle to guide AI development and deployment towards planetary stability.

Human-AI coevolution, defined as a process in which humans and AI algorithms continuously influence each other, increasingly characterises our society, but is understudied in artificial intelligence and complexity science literature. Recommender systems and assistants play a prominent role in human-AI coevolution, as they permeate many facets of daily life and influence human choices through online platforms. The interaction between users and AI results in a potentially endless feedback loop, wherein users' choices generate data to train AI models, which, in turn, shape subsequent user preferences. This human-AI feedback loop has peculiar characteristics compared to traditional human-machine interaction and gives rise to complex and often "unintended" systemic outcomes. This paper introduces human-AI coevolution as the cornerstone for a new field of study at the intersection between AI and complexity science focused on the theoretical, empirical, and mathematical investigation of the human-AI feedback loop. In doing so, we: (i) outline the pros and cons of existing methodologies and highlight shortcomings and potential ways for capturing feedback loop mechanisms; (ii) propose a reflection at the intersection between complexity science, AI and society; (iii) provide real-world examples for different human-AI ecosystems; and (iv) illustrate challenges to the creation of such a field of study, conceptualising them at increasing levels of abstraction, i.e., scientific, legal and socio-political.

A sociotechnical systems lens on AI is often used to bring attention to the human factors and societal impacts that are often neglected through technical abstraction. However, abstraction is also a general principle of sociotechnical systems, where functional objectives (e.g. fair hiring decisions) are operationalised into low-level implementations (e.g. fair algorithms, recourse, legal basis). The trouble with abstraction arises when critical contextual factors are erroneously neglected, leading to an impoverished representation of the problem space. De-contextualisation can render the resulting solutions problematic when they are re-contextualised back into the site of use, where misabstractions may produce safety hazards, harms, moral wrongs, and context frictions. Despite growing recognition that context matters for how sociotechnical systems operate in practice, the normative implications of abstraction are still understudied. In this paper, we propose misabstraction as an analytic framework for thinking about the perils and challenges of sociotechnical abstraction. We use the framework to analyse the requirements specification outlined in the procurement tender of a recommender system for public employment services and show how misabstractions cascade through the sociotechnical stack, producing ripple effects that implicate hidden and neglected contextual factors across multiple frames (e.g. institutional, organisational, operational, and algorithmic). Misabstraction can help policymakers, system designers, critical scholars, and civil society alike to attend to the political conditions that shape design, and their implications for understanding and addressing systemic risk in sociotechnical AI systems.

The increasing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across various sectors of society raises complex ethical challenges requiring systematic and scalable oversight mechanisms. While tools such as AIF360 and Aequitas address specific dimensions, namely fairness, there remains a lack of comprehensive frameworks capable of auditing multiple ethical principles simultaneously. This paper introduces a multidimensional AI auditing tool designed to evaluate systems across key dimensions: fairness, explainability, robustness, transparency, bias, sustainability, and legal compliance. Unlike existing tools, our framework enables simultaneous assessment of these dimensions, supporting more holistic and accountable AI deployment. We demonstrate the tool’s applicability through use cases and discuss its implications for building trust and aligning AI development with fundamental ethical standards.

Agentic AI seeks to endow systems with sustained autonomy, reasoning, and interaction capabilities. To realize this vision, its assumptions about agency must be complemented by explicit models of cognition, cooperation, and governance. This paper argues that the conceptual tools developed within the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) community, such as BDI architectures, communication protocols, mechanism design, and institutional modelling, provide precisely such a foundation. By aligning adaptive, data-driven approaches with structured models of reasoning and coordination, we outline a path toward agentic systems that are not only capable and flexible, but also transparent, cooperative, and accountable. The result is a perspective on agency that bridges formal theory and practical autonomy.