Democracy Levels for AI

There is widespread concern that organizations involved in the development, alignment, and governance of AI may act unilaterally in ways that undermine the public interest. Recent pilots — such as Meta's Community Forums and Anthropic's Collective Constitutional AI — have illustrated a promising direction, where democratic processes are used to increase trust in critical decisions. However, there is no standard framework for evaluating such processes. In this paper, building on insights from the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, we provide a "Democracy Levels" framework for evaluating the degree to which decisions in a given domain are made democratically. The framework can be used (i) to define milestones in a roadmap for the democratic AI, pluralistic AI and public AI ecosystems, (ii) to guide organizations that need to increase the legitimacy of their decisions on difficult AI governance questions, and (iii) as a rubric by those aiming to evaluate AI organizations and keep them accountable.