Regulatory Consulting at Brookings Institution

Overview

The Brookings Institution is one of Washington’s most influential think tanks, and it has become a central hub of AI-governance scholarship through its Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology (AIET) Initiative and its Center for Technology Innovation (CTI). The AIET Initiative draws on scholars from across all five of Brookings’s research programs to identify the governance models and best practices that let society capture the benefits of AI while managing its risks — independent, non-partisan, and deliberately cross-disciplinary. In a significant 2025 leadership shift, the initiative is now directed by Elham Tabassi, a prominent engineer and AI-governance leader who previously helped shape the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, after founding director Chris Meserole departed to lead the industry-backed Frontier Model Forum. Brookings’s AI work spans the practical and the conceptual: it produces widely used frameworks for making sense of a fragmenting global governance landscape, convenes the Global Forum on Democracy and Technology, and hosts landmark events such as the annual rollout of Stanford HAI’s AI Index in Washington. Its bench of scholars — including Nicol Turner Lee, Darrell West, Cameron Kerry, and John Villasenor — gives it unusual range across AI and civil rights, the future of work, privacy, and international AI policy, making Brookings a first stop for policymakers seeking credible, readable analysis of how AI should be governed.

AI-Focused Regulatory Work

Brookings is where AI-governance scholarship becomes shared vocabulary. Its 2026 work on mapping a fragmented AI governance landscape introduced a set of tools — an ‘AI Governance Stack’ that organizes policy instruments by level of abstraction (grown from eight to fifteen layers between 2020 and 2025), an ‘AI Governance Map’ that plots instruments against thematic focus areas drawn from the OECD AI Principles and the NIST AI RMF, and an ‘Anchors and Hooks’ framework describing how governance instruments interrelate. Rather than argue for a single global regime, Brookings makes the case that the world’s AI governance should be understood as a distributed, networked architecture — an argument it has advanced through the Forum for Cooperation on AI. The institution’s real influence, though, comes from combining that conceptual clarity with convening power: when Stanford HAI takes its annual AI Index on the road, Brookings is where it lands in Washington, and the resulting discussions — featuring figures like AIET director Elham Tabassi — help set the terms policymakers use to talk about AI. Tabassi’s arrival from NIST is itself a signal of Brookings’s trajectory: it pairs the institution’s policy credibility with hands-on standards expertise at exactly the moment agencies are trying to operationalize responsible AI. With scholars like Nicol Turner Lee (who directs CTI and writes on AI and civil rights), Darrell West (on AI, robotics, and the future of work), and legal thinkers like Cameron Kerry and John Villasenor, Brookings offers a rare combination of nonpartisan credibility, cross-disciplinary range, and the convening gravity to move ideas from a report into the policy conversation.

Notable AI Policy Work

• Published ‘New Tools for Mapping a Fragmented AI Governance Landscape’ (2026), introducing the AI Governance Stack, the AI Governance Map, and the ‘Anchors and Hooks’ framework for understanding how governance instruments interrelate.
• Advanced (via the Forum for Cooperation on AI) a ‘network architecture for global AI policy’ — arguing for a distributed rather than consolidated global governance landscape.
• Runs the AI & Emerging Technology (AIET) Initiative, drawing scholars from all five Brookings research programs, now led by former NIST leader Elham Tabassi.
• Convenes the Global Forum on Democracy and Technology and hosts the Washington rollout of Stanford HAI’s annual AI Index Report.
• Sustains a deep bench of AI scholarship via the Center for Technology Innovation — on AI and civil rights, the future of work, privacy, and international AI policy — and publishes through TechTank.

Thought Leadership

1. New Tools for Mapping a Fragmented AI Governance Landscape (2026)
   Introduces Brookings’ AI Governance Stack, AI Governance Map, and ‘Anchors and Hooks’ framework for making sense of a fragmenting global governance landscape.
2. Brookings — Artificial Intelligence topic hub
   Brookings’ AI topic hub — scholarship on AI governance, civil rights, the future of work, and international AI policy.
3. Brookings — Technology & Information
   The Center for Technology Innovation’s broader technology-policy research feed.

Clients

Nonpartisan research institution serving Congress, federal agencies, international bodies, and the broad public-interest audience. Funded by a diverse array of foundations, governments, corporations, and individuals, with each publication representing the sole views of its authors.