Expanded Collaboration to Boost Critical AI Governance Data and Tracking Tool

CSET has spent the past year building AGORA, a searchable archive of more than 1,000 AI-related laws, regulations, and standards from around the globe. Now the project is getting reinforcements. Purdue's Governance and Responsible AI Lab, already a partner, is being joined by MIT's AI Risk Initiative and Carnegie Mellon's EncyclopAIdia team, turning a single-university collaboration into a three-school research operation.

The timing makes sense. AI policy has exploded since 2024, with the EU AI Act rolling out in phases, US states passing their own patchwork of rules, and standards bodies churning out frameworks faster than anyone can track manually. AGORA was built to be the place where researchers and policymakers go instead of hunting through dozens of government websites, and CSET says it has already become foundational for people working on AI governance in the US, the EU, and elsewhere.

What changes with this expansion isn't the tool's basic function but its capacity. MIT and Carnegie Mellon will help with sourcing new documents, screening them, and annotating them, while CSET keeps hosting the actual interface and data infrastructure. Catherine Aiken, who runs data science and research at CSET, framed it as a way to add documents faster and make the tool more useful for people actually making decisions, not just studying the field from the outside.

Daniel Schiff, who co-directs GRAIL at Purdue, put it in blunter terms: the goal is for AGORA to become the definitive AI policy archive, and that requires momentum from students and researchers who are willing to do the unglamorous work of reading and tagging regulatory text. Three research teams pooling effort is a practical bet that more hands means broader coverage of document types and more countries represented, rather than a big feature overhaul.

There's nothing flashy here — no new AI model, no funding announcement, no splashy demo. But for anyone trying to make sense of how AI is actually being regulated across jurisdictions, a well-maintained, expanding archive matters more than most headline-grabbing AI news. Policy tracking is unglamorous work, and unglamorous work is exactly what tends to get underfunded and under-resourced until someone decides to fix it.