🔔 The number of AI-related governance documents is rapidly proliferating, but what risks, mitigations, and other concepts do these documents actually cover?

MIT AI Risk Initiative researchers Simon Mylius, Peter Slattery, Yan Zhu, Alexander Saeri, Jess Graham, Michael Noetel, and Neil Thompson teamed up with CSET’s Mina Narayanan and Adrian Thinnyun to pilot an approach to map over 950 AI governance documents to several extensible taxonomies. These taxonomies cover AI risks and actors, industry sectors targeted, and other AI-related concepts, complementing AGORA’s thematic taxonomy of risk factors, harms, governance strategies, incentives for compliance, and application areas.

In the second installation of our blog series analyzing 147 AI-related laws enacted by Congress between January 2020 and March 2025 from AGORA, we explore the governance strategies, risk-related concepts, and harms addressed in the legislation. In the first blog, we showed that the majority of these AI-related legislative documents were drawn from National Defense Authorization Acts and apply to national security contexts.

In this two-part analysis, we use data from the Emerging Technology Observatory's AGORA to explore AI-related legislation that was enacted by Congress between January 2020 and March 2025. This first blog explores the origin and application domains of the AI-related legislation we reviewed. The second blog examines the governance strategies, risk-related concepts, and harms covered by this legislation.

The choice of method for surfacing AI-relevant publications impacts the ultimate research findings. This report provides a quantitative analysis of various methods available to researchers for identifying AI-relevant research within CSET’s merged corpus, and showcases the research implications of each method.

Brian Love is a Senior Software Engineer at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where he works on the Emerging Technology Observatory initiative.

Making sense of the often overwhelming world of emerging tech with data-driven tools and resources.

Katherine Quinn is a Data Scientist at CSET.

Christian Schoeberl was a Senior Data Research Analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).

CSET’s Map of Science reveals that Germany leads the world in robotics for automotive engineering.

Ronnie-Jade Kinoshita is the Deputy Director of Data Science and Research at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).