The State of AI Ethics Report (Volume 8): Power, Fracture, Resistance

The State of AI Ethics Report (SAIER) Volume 8 examines how power over AI was exercised in 2026, where governance arrangements fell short, and how communities sought to influence the decisions affecting them.

Across 62 contributions from 91 researchers, practitioners, organizers, public servants and workers in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Pacific and the Americas, the volume documents a recurring pattern. The terms of AI were set upstream, by labs, export regulators, and the firms and states that control compute. The consequences arrived downstream, in council chambers, collective agreements, triage desks and border kiosks. In between, the procedures ran as designed.

Organised in six parts and eighteen chapters, the report covers participation and sovereignty; surveillance, military AI and oversight; labour and data centre infrastructure; care, education and creative work; agentic AI, biometrics and open models; and AI literacy, civil society and government procurement.

Edited by Renjie Butalid and Connor Wright. Published by the Montreal AI Ethics Institute (MAIEI) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Available at https://montrealethics.ai/state