The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, also referred to as Knight Columbia, is a nonprofit institute working on the First Amendment, technology, and democracy. It was founded in 2017 with more than $30 million from the Knight Foundation and Columbia University, and is located at Columbia University in New York.
Activities
Knight Columbia publishes the Knight Columbia essay series, a peer-edited venue for long-form essays on technology, democracy, and the public sphere aimed at an interdisciplinary academic and policy audience.
In 2025-26 the series carried several essays on AI governance. Its May 2026 symposium on AI in democratic society produced or republished five foundational essays:
- Anticipatory AI Ethics (Lazar, Knight Columbia, May 1 2026) (Lazar — Anticipatory AI Ethics; May 1)
- AI as Social Technology (Farrell + Shalizi, Knight Columbia, May 11 2026) (Farrell and Shalizi — AI as Social Technology; May 11)
- A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Mulligan + Marda + Wang, Knight Columbia, March 16 2026) (Mulligan, Marda, and Wang — A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies; March 16)
- Building AI for the Democratic Matrix: A Technical Research Agenda for Normative Competence and Normative Institutions (Hadfield + Trivedi + Hadfield-Menell, Knight Columbia, March 3 2026) (Hadfield, Trivedi, and Hadfield-Menell — Building AI for the Democratic Matrix; March 3)
- Levels of Autonomy for AI Agents (Feng + McDonald + Zhang, Knight Columbia, 2026) (Feng, McDonald, and Zhang — Levels of Autonomy for AI Agents; July 2025, republished May 2026)
The AI as Normal Technology essay (Narayanan and Kapoor, 2025), summarized at AI as Normal Technology, also appeared through Knight Columbia.
These five 2025-26 essays share several characteristics: each rejects the AGI and Singularity framing as the dominant analytical primitive; each emphasizes the deployment environment as central to policy analysis; and each offers a named, citable framework rather than diffuse critique.
Relationships
- affiliated-with: Columbia University
- funded-by: Knight Foundation
- publishes: Anticipatory AI Ethics (Lazar, Knight Columbia, May 1 2026), AI as Social Technology (Farrell + Shalizi, Knight Columbia, May 11 2026), A Conceptual Model to Guide AI Risk Governance Strategies (Mulligan + Marda + Wang, Knight Columbia, March 16 2026), Building AI for the Democratic Matrix: A Technical Research Agenda for Normative Competence and Normative Institutions (Hadfield + Trivedi + Hadfield-Menell, Knight Columbia, March 3 2026), Levels of Autonomy for AI Agents (Feng + McDonald + Zhang, Knight Columbia, 2026), AI as Normal Technology
- related: Lawfare (parallel venue for legal-and-policy essays), AI as Social Technology, Anticipatory AI Ethics (Lazar framework, including the Technological Horizon), Sociotechnical AI Risk Governance, Normative Competence, Levels of Autonomy for AI Agents (Feng-McDonald-Zhang framework), AI as Normal Technology
Sources
- Multiple foundational source pages (see "publishes" above)