Whose Voice Counts? Mapping Stakeholder Perspectives on AI Through Public Submissions to the U.S. Government

2026-05-21

AI Summary

This study addresses significant disparities in how different stakeholder groups perceive the societal impacts of artificial intelligence, with individual concerns often marginalized in policy discourse. Drawing on public comments submitted during the consultation period for the Trump administration’s American AI Initiative, the authors develop a rigorous corpus-cleaning pipeline and employ topic modeling alongside frequency analysis to systematically compare the focal concerns of academics, private-sector entities, and individual citizens—and to assess their representation in official policy texts. The findings reveal that individuals predominantly emphasize AI’s tangible effects on everyday life, whereas private-sector respondents prioritize safety, development, and regulatory frameworks. Current AI policy largely reflects the latter’s agenda, exhibiting a marked underrepresentation of individual perspectives and exposing a structural deficit in mechanisms for meaningful public participation.

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more common in our daily lives, it is important to understand how different stakeholders comprehend and envisage the role that these technologies play in shaping social, political, and economic realities. In this paper, we investigate public perceptions of AI based on a corpus of letters submitted during the public consultation for the Trump Administration's US AI Action Plan. To this aim, we release a corpus cleaning pipeline and perform topic modelling and frequency analysis to explore predominant topics discussed by different subgroups (e.g., academia, individuals, private sector) and those appearing in the AI Action Plan. Our results show that individuals voice strong concerns related to the impact of AI on life, while other stakeholders are more concerned with AI development. Our comparison of topics suggests that the AI Action Plan reflects predominantly the concerns of the private sector on security, policies, and development, with individuals' concerns less represented.

Problem

• AI governance
• stakeholder perspectives
• public consultation
• policy representation
• artificial intelligence

Innovation

• corpus cleaning pipeline
• topic modelling
• stakeholder analysis
• public consultation
• AI policy