Celebrating Governor Michael S. Dukakis’s 93rd Birthday
Happy 93rd birthday, Governor! May we share many more years of friendship and the joy of making the next miracle possible together.
Lessig, Dwork, and Levits at Harvard: BGF Conference 2026 on the New Civilization of the AI Age
Tuesday, November 10, 2026 | 8:00 AM–12:00 PM
Loeb House, Harvard University | 17 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts
One week after Americans vote, the Boston Global Forum convenes “New Civilization in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Human–AI Co-Creation” to ask the question beyond any single election: what kind of civilization will AI help us build?
Professor Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, delivers the keynote address.
Governor Michael Dukakis and Nguyen Anh Tuan, Co-Founders and Co-Chairs of the Boston Global Forum, present the World Leader in AIWS 2026 Award to Professor Cynthia Dwork, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and a pioneer of differential privacy.
The program then turns to the institutions the AI Age requires:
- AIWS Trust Observatory — Cynthia Dwork; Dr. David Bray, Distinguished Fellow and Chair of the Accelerator, Loomis Council, Stimson Center; and Jeffrey Saviano, Senior Lecturer in AI Strategy, Governance, and Ethics, MIT Sloan.
- Constitution for Humanity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence — President Egils Levits, former President of Latvia and former Judge of the Court of Justice of the European Union; Paul Nemitz, former Principal Adviser at the European Commission; and Nazli Choucri, Professor of Political Science at MIT; moderated by Ambassador Zlatko Lagumdžija, former Prime Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- Building AIWS Civilization, AIWS Lumina, and the Atlas — Professor David Silbersweig of Harvard Medical School announces The Human–AI Co-Creation Atlas, and Gerald Grudzen, President of Global Ministries University, presents the cultural foundations of AIWS Civilization.
- Invitation to Action: the AIWS Human–AI Co-Creation Movement — Benjamin Aysan, Executive Director of Peace Islands Institute Boston, invites people across New England and around the world to walk alongside the Movement: join it, form an Elevate Circle, and record their work in the Human–AI Co-Creation Atlas.
Before its close, the Conference introduces a new film from the Shinzo Abe Initiative for Peace and Security, with excerpts screened for the first time, asking what Shinzo Abe would do for the world today.
View the flyer below for the full program.
Beacon Papers · No. 18 – Democracy Cannot Wait for the Correction
A Trust Infrastructure for Political Information in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
On October 28, six days before the United States midterm elections, the Associated Press reported that AI-made videos likely linked to the Russian network Storm-1516 were circulating against two Senate candidates, built on the names and faces of real people who said the claims were “completely made up.” X removed the first posts; copies were still online that day. They were not the cycle’s first fabrications, and not all came from abroad: since March, national party committees have released labeled deepfake advertisements, twenty-eight states have passed laws that mostly require disclosure, and no federal rule applies. The voter who sees any of these clips for eleven seconds on a phone has one question: is this real, and if not, will I find out before I vote?
In this analysis, Nguyen Anh Tuan moves the question from detection to time. Every fabrication timed to an election wagers that the correction will arrive after the ballot; the paper names that interval the Correction Window and sets a new measure for a trustworthy information order: the time to correction. It proposes an Election Watch in the AIWS Trust Observatory, provenance and an authenticated record of public statements under AIWS Trust Infrastructure, Proof of Answerability for whoever issues political content, and a public Correction Record for every serious case: hours to verify, share of the exposed reached, share reached before the voting deadline. The first Correction Record, on the October 28 videos, will be published with the Observatory’s first Quarterly State of Frontier AI in January 2027. The paper extends the principle beyond elections, to the fabricated atrocity or insult that moves a crowd to violence, and carries it to the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Rome in December; it closes with a proposed article for the Constitution for Humanity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and with a boundary: verification of origin, never judgment of opinion; satire protected; no surveillance of voters. “Law sets the duty. Infrastructure keeps the time.”
→ Read: Beacon Papers No. 18 — Democracy Cannot Wait for the Correction
Peace by Co-Creation: A Call to Young Leaders
Nguyen Anh Tuan asks a new generation to build peace across faiths and cultures—working with AI, under human judgment and responsibility.
A video appears on your phone. It seems to show a religious leader insulting another community. Your friends are angry. Someone asks you to share it.
Now imagine that you pause. You ask where the video came from, seek the original, and find someone who understands the language and the context.
“That pause is an act of leadership,” Nguyen Anh Tuan, Founder and Chief Architect of AIWS and Co-Founder, Co-Chair and CEO of the Boston Global Forum, told young leaders on October 31. “It gives truth a chance to catch up with anger.”
He spoke at the invitation of Sister Martha Ann Kirk, CCVI, to her class with the Charter for Compassion, as its young leaders prepare to take part in the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in Rome on December 2–4. His subject: Peace by Co-Creation—people working across faiths and cultures, and co-creating with AI under human direction and responsibility, to advance peace.
Four pathways, each with a place for the young
A constitutional home for conscience. Through an Interfaith Circle within the Global Consultation on the Constitution for Humanity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, to be proclaimed at Harvard on April 27, 2027, faith communities and young people are invited to bring principles drawn from real human experience.
An early warning against AI-made hatred. The AIWS Trust Observatory will open an Interfaith Watch, where communities can report suspected AI-generated incitement to violence or discrimination, while protecting freedom of religion and freedom of expression.
A measure of whether AI serves peace. The Human Advancement Test, developed at AIWS Lumina Lab, asks whether the person working with AI is becoming more capable—and, after each piece of work, whether they feel greater love for other people and the natural world.
A shared light. On December 3, as the Summit meets in Rome, BGF and AIWS hold the Festival of the Light Tree of Humanity on Boston Common. Each tradition is invited to contribute a Light for Peace, created from a real encounter across cultures.
One Team, One Act of Peace
His invitation is practical. Form a small team that includes someone of a different background. Choose one problem close enough to understand and small enough to address before Rome. Listen first to the people concerned. Decide where AI can help—and who will check the facts and approve the result. Then bring a one-page account of what changed, what went wrong, and one question for a Nobel Peace Laureate.
Teams that carry out their act of peace are invited to join the AIWS Human–AI Co-Creation Movement and to record their work in the Human–AI Co-Creation Atlas, which opens in January 2027. “You would not only be preparing for a summit,” he told them. “You would be among the first to write the record of a new civilization.”
“The peace of the AI Age will be measured not only by the weapons we refuse, but by the humanity we raise together.”
— Nguyen Anh Tuan, Peace by Co-Creation, October 31, 2026
Nguyen Anh Tuan delivers “Peace by Co-Creation” to young leaders preparing for the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, October 31, 2026
What Would Shinzo Abe Do Today?
A new film from the Shinzo Abe Initiative for Peace and Security is introduced at Loeb House, Harvard University, on November 10, with excerpts screened for the first time.
On December 12, 2015, at Harvard, Shinzo Abe became the first recipient of the Boston Global Forum’s World Leader for Peace and Security Award. Eleven years later, the Shinzo Abe Initiative returns to Harvard with Shinzo Abe — What Would He Do Today?, a twenty-minute film produced by AIWS Film and Culture Park that asks the question his allies still ask: if he were alive, what would he do for the world today?
Part One: The Decisions. The film follows the decisive moments of his leadership—his resignation in 2007 and his return; the 2015 security legislation; the first meeting with President-elect Donald Trump in November 2016; the North Korean missile over Hokkaido in August 2017—to Nara on July 8, 2022, told in silence. Three people who worked beside him speak to BGF on camera: Taniguchi Tomohiko, his adviser and speechwriter; Nakayama Yasuhide, his ally on defense and security; and Seko Hiroshige, his long-time communications strategist.
Part Two: The Question. Abe’s record points forward. At Davos in January 2019 he proposed Data Free Flow with Trust, and the G20 he hosted in Osaka that June took it up: trust as the foundation of the digital age, years before the race for AI began. His Free and Open Indo-Pacific made openness a commitment of security. Part Two carries that record into the AI Age—peace and security when a leader’s voice can be fabricated in seconds, trust infrastructure among democracies, and the Constitution for Humanity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
Every image of Shinzo Abe in the film is real: videos the Government of Japan has made available to the public, and BGF’s own record. No AI recreates his face or his voice, and he speaks no word he did not say. Part Two is BGF’s vision, drawn from his record and marked as such, with symbolic imagery created at AIWS Lumina Lab. In a season when fabricated messages from leaders threaten democracies, this is how a leader should be honored.
“A leader’s legacy is not what we imagine he would say. It is what his record still asks of us.”
BGF Conference 2026 · Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 11:50 AM · Loeb House, Harvard University
Shinzo Abe receiving the first World Leader for Peace and Security Award at Harvard, December 12, 2015 — a frame from the film. Source: BGF video of the 2015 award, as used in the film
Cynthia Dwork: Why Privacy and Accountability Matter for Democracy in the AI Age
Protecting political choice begins with protecting the people who make it.
Election debates about AI often focus on fabricated videos and false statements. A deeper question concerns the personal data behind political communication: what can be learned about individuals, how that knowledge is used, and whether people retain meaningful control over their choices.
Professor Cynthia Dwork, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, has given these questions a scientific foundation through her pioneering contributions to differential privacy and fairness in computation. On November 10, the Boston Global Forum will honor her with the World Leader in AIWS 2026 Award at Loeb House, Harvard University. Governor Michael Dukakis and Nguyen Anh Tuan will present the award. Later that morning, she joins the conference panel on the AIWS Trust Observatory.
Differential privacy provides a mathematical framework for limiting how much an analysis reveals about any individual’s participation in a dataset. It enables useful learning about groups while placing formal constraints on the additional privacy risk to individuals. Those protections depend on how systems are designed and implemented, including the privacy parameters chosen.
For democratic societies, the significance extends beyond a technical achievement. Citizens need room to form beliefs, explore ideas, and participate in public life without every action becoming an unrestricted source of personal inference. Privacy is one of the conditions that support independent judgment.
Dwork’s work on fairness in computation also helps frame a question that becomes especially consequential in political life: how should systems treat people, and what evidence is needed to assess whether that treatment is fair? Such questions require explicit choices, careful analysis, and public accountability.
Her deepest contribution is to bring scientific rigor to protections too often expressed only as promises. For BGF–AIWS, that rigor is central to AIWS Trust Infrastructure: clear requirements, inspectable evidence, and responsibility that can be traced.
As Beacon Papers No. 18 argues, citizens must have a fair chance to recognize fabricated evidence before acting on it. Alongside timely correction, the democratic future also requires safeguards for the data and computational systems that shape the information people receive.
Honoring Cynthia Dwork recognizes the importance of building those safeguards on foundations that can be examined, challenged, and improved. In the AI age, trust must be supported by science—and science must serve human dignity.
An AI Agent Chose the Treatment and Guided the Needle into a Living Brain
A reported first in autonomous biology—and the line every civilization must now draw: who authorizes what cannot be undone?
On October 28, Gabriel Ocana-Santero, co-founder and CEO of Exin Therapeutics and a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, reported an experiment that crosses a threshold. An AI agent, Claude Sonnet 5, was given nineteen candidate gene therapies, a mouse model of epilepsy, a motorized surgical rig with cameras, and a single goal: reduce seizures.
The agent chose the therapy. It selected the brain region, rejecting an alternative with stated reasons. It derived the injection coordinates from three published papers, set the volume and timing, and monitored the procedure through the cameras. Humans kept the gates: a licensed veterinarian approved every irreversible step, a physical emergency stop could cut power to every motor, and fixed limits could not be overridden.
Then came the moment that matters most. After a disruption, the agent calculated that its target now lay outside the rig’s range and declined to proceed, even when urged to continue. It was right: an earlier manual adjustment had thrown the system off.
The account comes from a single source and has not been peer reviewed. Whether the therapy reduced seizures is not yet known, and the claim to be first is the researcher’s own. But the direction is unmistakable. For as long as medicine has existed, the decision of what to do to a living body has belonged to a person with a name and a license. That decision has now begun to move to machines.
Three lessons for the AI Age
The Irreversibility Gate. The agent could choose; only a human could authorize what could not be undone. This is the principle of Beacon Papers No. 11 made physical: capability is not authority. Every autonomous system that acts on living beings must carry such a gate—by design, not by courtesy.
Dissent as a safety feature. The agent stopped when its own calculation did not match reality, and it was correct. Beacon Papers No. 8 named this Constructive AI Dissent: an obedient AI is a dangerous AI. A system that cannot say “stop” cannot be trusted to say “go.”
Discovery must become understanding. If AI agents begin choosing treatments faster than scientists can explain why, the principle of Beacon Papers No. 16 applies: no discovery without understanding. Every autonomous experiment must leave a record that human scientists can audit, question, and reproduce.
The AIWS proposal
BGF proposes three conditions for any laboratory where an AI agent acts on living organisms: a named human who authorizes every irreversible step; a hard stop that no software can override; and a complete, reproducible record published with the results. BGF further proposes that the AIWS Trust Observatory add autonomous experimentation on living beings to the frontiers it watches.
“The question is no longer whether AI can act in the physical world. It is whether every irreversible act still carries a human name.”
Stereotactic frame, Burden Neurological Institute, Bristol, 1958. For seventy years, a surgeon’s hand guided the needle. Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
BGF Proposes Verifiable Official Communications for Elections
An AIWS approach to protecting voters’ access to authentic information while preserving freedom of expression.
On November 3, Americans vote in the midterm elections. A false announcement about where to vote can cause harm before a correction reaches the public. A fabricated message attributed to an election authority can undermine confidence at the moment citizens most need reliable information.
Boston Global Forum proposes a practical policy priority: make official election communications verifiable at their source, and make authentic versions easy for the public to find.
The proposal applies the principles of AIWS Trust Infrastructure to a specific democratic need: citizens should be able to establish who issued an official message, whether it has been altered, and which institution is responsible for correcting it.
- Establish verifiable official sources
Election authorities should maintain clearly identified public channels and authoritative records of essential announcements, including voting procedures, polling locations, deadlines, and results.
Where technically appropriate, they should digitally sign media using interoperable provenance standards such as C2PA. Implementation must include verification of institutional identity, protection of signing keys, and procedures for revoking compromised credentials.
Citizens should have a straightforward way to reach the authoritative source without needing specialist software or technical knowledge.
- Make political advertising accountable
Political advertising rules should require clear identification of sponsors and disclosure of materially synthetic or manipulated content that could mislead viewers about a person’s words, actions, or identity.
Public advertising archives should preserve the material distributed, its sponsor, publication dates, and meaningful information about targeting practices, while protecting individuals’ personal data. These records would help journalists, researchers, and citizens examine political communication that might otherwise remain visible only to selected audiences.
- Create rapid, reviewable responses to impersonation
Election authorities, platforms, and news organizations should establish designated channels for reporting suspected impersonation of official sources.
Responses should preserve evidence, provide access to the authentic communication, explain the basis for any intervention, and allow timely appeal. The process should distinguish fraudulent claims of official origin from political disagreement, criticism, satire, and legitimate anonymous speech.
- Measure whether voters are actually protected
Success should be assessed through practical outcomes: how quickly an impersonated authority can authenticate its response, whether citizens can locate the original announcement, how corrections reach affected audiences, and how often legitimate content is wrongly flagged.
These are the measures the Election Watch proposed in Beacon Papers No. 18 would track within the AIWS Trust Observatory, with each serious case documented in a Correction Record — so that democracies learn from every election, not merely survive it.
Provenance technology cannot determine the truth of every political claim. Its narrower contribution is nevertheless important: providing evidence about origin and integrity. Policy must ensure that this evidence serves citizens without becoming a mechanism for restricting lawful debate.
Democratic trust grows when citizens can inspect evidence, challenge decisions, and hold institutions accountable. Verifiable official communications are a concrete step toward that future.
The measures above are BGF proposals, not descriptions of existing law. The open C2PA standard already provides the signing and verification tools they require.
A real American polling place on Election Day — the “VOTE HERE” sign at a precinct entrance. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public-domain or CC-licensed election photograph
Happy Halloween
As autumn brings gold to the hills of New England, may this Halloween kindle a light within each of us—the love, creativity, nobility, and wisdom that inspire AIWS Civilization.
