The Brookings Institution is a Washington, DC, policy research think tank whose AI work spans the Center for Technology Innovation (CTI), the AI Equity Lab, Governance Studies, and the Metropolitan Policy Program. Its AI output centers on US domestic-policy framing: analysis of federal and state AI legislation, labor and equity impacts, and regulatory design.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Type | 501(c)(3) nonprofit policy research (think tank) |
| Headquarters | Washington, DC |
| Founded | 1916 (institutionally); dedicated AI/tech work since the late 2010s |
| Relevant units | Center for Technology Innovation (CTI); AI Equity Lab; Governance Studies; Foreign Policy program (Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology; John L. Thornton China Center) |
Overview
Brookings is a mainstream US policy think tank operating from a broadly center, pro-governance vantage. Relative to Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which adopts a more competitive posture, and to RAND Corporation, which focuses on national security, Brookings tends toward domestic-policy framing: legislation analysis, labor and equity impacts, and federal and state regulatory design.
Activities
Brookings has been among the more active explainers of US state AI laws. Its analysis of California SB 53, authored by Malihe Alikhani and Aidan Kane (December 2025), is one of two practitioner-facing breakdowns of the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act cited here; the analysis is summarized in FPF and Brookings — California SB 53 Compliance Analyses (Oct–Dec 2025).
The AI Equity Lab, led by Nicol Turner Lee, focuses on bias, civil rights, and distributional impacts of AI systems, work adjacent to the AI-ethics tradition also represented by AI Now Institute. Brookings scholars appear regularly in the policy press, including TechTank and Lawfare-adjacent commentary, with output covering the EU AI Act, Executive Order 14110 — Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI, the America's AI Action Plan, and state legislation. Governance Studies and Foreign Policy programs produce work on AI and democracy, disinformation, and great-power competition.
Track II dialogue with Tsinghua University on AI and national security
The Foreign Policy program convenes a Track II Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence and National Security with Tsinghua University's Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS), with support from the Minderoo Foundation. The dialogue has run since 2019, aims to identify practical steps to manage risks relating to AI and national security, and develops a living glossary of AI and national-security terms (Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026)). Reuters described it as a dialogue whose work helps inform official discussions (Source: reuters.com).
On September 9, 2026, ahead of the U.S.-China government-level AI dialogue and the September 2026 Trump–Xi meeting, Brookings published a commentary by two dialogue participants, "Advancing human control of military AI." Brookings senior fellow Melanie W. Sisson argues that Trump and Xi should agree that only humans, not AI, make the decision to initiate a cyberattack against each other's nuclear command, control, and communications systems or critical infrastructure. Tianjiao Jiang of Fudan University's Development Institute proposes a list of red lines for military AI, a consensus on "meaningful human control" reached through dialogue or a terminology working group, and a China-U.S. military hotline for AI incidents (Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026)). Neither government has publicly endorsed the proposals (Source: reuters.com). See US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics and Autonomous Weapons.
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity
Brookings publishes the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA), a conference series and journal edited as of fall 2026 by nonresident senior fellows Janice Eberly and Jón Steinsson. Three papers presented at the fall 2026 conference on September 25, 2026 addressed the risks and rewards of the AI boom: "Why is AI so contentious," "The vanishing advantage of specialization," and "Financing the AI buildout" (Source: brookings.edu). The last, by Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia Business School, projects $10.3 trillion of U.S. AI infrastructure investment over 2025–2032, an average of 3.63% of GDP, and argues that the shift to off-balance-sheet financing raises asset-level leverage and makes correlated exposures harder to observe (Financing the AI Buildout (Van Nieuwerburgh, BPEA Fall 2026)). Each Brookings publication states that it represents the sole views of its authors.
Brookings scholar Kyle Chan's account of China pursuing multiple parallel AI races rather than a single race to AGI, given in a May 2026 interview with Ross Douthat, is summarized in China's Not the Problem. We Are. (NYT Interesting Times, Douthat-Chan, May 14 2026).
Key people
AI-relevant scholars (illustrative; the AI-relevant roster is broad and rotates widely):
- Nicol Turner Lee — Director, Center for Technology Innovation; AI Equity Lab lead.
- Darrell West — long-tenured tech policy scholar and writer on AI governance.
- Malihe Alikhani and Aidan Kane — co-authors of the Brookings SB 53 analysis.
- Melanie W. Sisson — Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy program and Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology; co-author of the September 2026 commentary on human control of military AI.
- Kyle Chan — author of the "multiple races" reading of China's AI strategy.
Positions
Brookings authors have generally supported transparency-oriented frontier AI legislation, including SB 53 and federal reporting memos such as OMB M-24-10. They have expressed caution toward pure state-preemption, expressing skepticism of attempts to block state AI regulation without substituted federal rules. They have also argued that voluntary frameworks such as the Frontier Model Forum (FMF) and the Seoul Commitments are insufficient as pure self-regulation without statutory backing. The AI Equity Lab argues that civil-rights and distributional concerns are parallel policy priorities rather than downstream of safety or competitiveness.
Funding and governance
Brookings is funded by a mix of foundations (Hewlett, Ford, Rockefeller), corporations, high-net-worth individuals, and foreign governments. The AI Equity Lab has specific foundation and corporate support. Critics point to corporate and foreign funding as a potential source of bias; Brookings publishes its donor list and has tightened disclosure policies in the last decade.
Relationships
- related: FPF and Brookings — California SB 53 Compliance Analyses (Oct–Dec 2025) — primary Brookings wiki source
- related: California SB 53 — Transparency in Frontier AI Act — subject of the Brookings SB 53 analysis
- related: RAND Corporation, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) — adjacent Washington think tanks; Brookings is more domestic-policy oriented
- related: AI Now Institute — overlapping concerns on equity and civil rights, from different traditions
- related: America's AI Action Plan, Executive Order 14110 — Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI — federal policy Brookings scholars analyze
- related: US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics — Track II dialogue with Tsinghua CISS; Chan's "multiple races" framework
- related: Autonomous Weapons — Sisson and Jiang proposals on human control of military AI
- related: Financing the AI Buildout (Van Nieuwerburgh, BPEA Fall 2026) — BPEA Fall 2026 paper on financing the AI buildout; author Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh
- related: Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026) — the Track II commentary; authors Melanie W. Sisson and Tianjiao Jiang
Sources in Wiki
- FPF and Brookings — California SB 53 Compliance Analyses (Oct–Dec 2025)
- China's Not the Problem. We Are. (NYT Interesting Times, Douthat-Chan, May 14 2026)
- Advancing human control of military AI (Sisson and Jiang, Brookings, September 2026) — Sisson and Jiang commentary (September 9, 2026)
- (Source: reuters.com) — Reuters on the Brookings–Tsinghua proposals