Expanded Collaboration to Boost Critical AI Governance Data and Tracking Tool
CSET Georgetown Emily Tavenner ● Covered by 75 sources
CSET is teaming up with MIT and Carnegie Mellon to grow AGORA, its database of 1,000+ AI laws and rules. More hands means faster coverage of the global patchwork of AI regulation everyone's trying to track.
Based on reporting by CSET Georgetown, Emily Tavenner — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
AGORA has quietly become one of those tools that policy nerds and journalists keep bookmarked: a public archive, run by Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, that catalogs more than 1,000 AI-related laws, regulations, and standards from the U.S., the EU, and elsewhere. Since it launched in 2024, it's been used by researchers and policymakers trying to make sense of a regulatory picture that changes by the week. Now CSET is widening the circle of people building it.
Purdue University's Governance and Responsible AI Lab has been part of AGORA from early on, and that partnership continues. But joining them now are two new teams: MIT's AI Risk Initiative and Carnegie Mellon's EncyclopAIdia project. CSET will keep hosting the interface and the underlying data infrastructure, while the three university teams split the grunt work — sourcing documents, screening them, annotating them, and helping publish analysis built on top of the archive.
What AGORA actually offers isn't flashy, but it's useful in a very specific way: plain-English summaries of dense legal text, metadata, thematic tags, filters, and full documents for hundreds of AI policies, with new material added on an ongoing basis. That's the kind of infrastructure that doesn't make headlines but ends up cited constantly by people who need to compare, say, how one country's AI standards differ from another's without wading through raw statute language themselves.
Catherine Aiken, who directs data science and research at CSET, framed the expansion as a matter of keeping pace — more document processing capacity, faster turnaround, better usability. Daniel Schiff, GRAIL's co-director and a Purdue assistant professor, put it in terms of momentum: the project has built a community of students and researchers around it, and he sees pooling resources across three institutions as the way to make AGORA the definitive AI policy archive rather than just a good one. Given how fragmented AI governance still is across jurisdictions, that ambition doesn't seem far-fetched.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Nobody's going to write a splashy headline about a database getting a bigger research team, but this is the unglamorous work that actually holds up the AI policy conversation everyone else argues about. Tools like AGORA matter more as AI rules multiply across countries with zero coordination between them, and pooling MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Purdue's efforts instead of each building a rival tracker is the sane move. More archives like this, please, and fewer duplicate spreadsheets nobody outside one lab ever sees.
Read more about this at: CSET Georgetown