Civic AI — 6-Pack of Care

Governance should feel like a daily capability, not just a periodic vote.

Civic AI is artificial intelligence that answers to the people it affects. Instead of one powerful system built to govern everyone, the idea is to build many small ones that a community can own, inspect, correct, and switch off.

Each of these local stewards has a name — the Kami (knowledge artefact management intelligence): a spirit of place, not a universal governor.

Most AI alignment work — the effort to get AI to act in line with human values — tries to solve those values from the top down: write better rules, infer better preferences, train better models. Those tools matter. They are not enough on their own. The 6-Pack of Care starts somewhere else. It asks who gets heard, who is accountable, how failures are repaired, and when a system should stop. Alignment is not solved once. It is maintained in public — an accountable civic procedure the book calls alignment-by-process.

Kamis help neighbourhoods, schools, unions, faith groups, cities, and diasporas do what collective self-government has always promised but rarely delivered at scale: listen across difference, deliberate in the open, remember faithfully, and act together. No central model owns them. No platform extracts from them. Communities govern them, inspect them, contest them, and shut them down.

The breakthrough is not smarter chatbots. It is stronger self-government: institutions that show their work, repair harm in public, and carry civic memory across generations. The superintelligence does not need to come. It is already here. It is us.

Start here

Just heard about Civic AI? Three steps in.

1. Get the idea. Read the Manifesto — the whole argument in Audrey Tang's own words.
2. Meet the six principles. Skim the 6-Pack below: six plain-language tests for AI a community can actually trust.
3. See it work. "AI Alignment Cannot Be Top-Down" tells how Taiwan answered a wave of AI-enabled scam ads — the framework in the real world.

Prefer to listen? Take the 6-Pack of Care podcast or "Can AI Be Compassionate?" along for a walk.

Prefer visuals? Browse all comics — Nicky Case's illustrated overview and twelve chapter pages.

Ready to run one? Set up your own Kami on your own laptop in three steps — bounded, local, and private.

Already know what you're after?

• Policy & governance — Manifesto, FAQ, and "AI Alignment Cannot Be Top-Down".
• Builders & engineers — Pack 3: Competence, Measures, and "Inside the Kami".
• Civic & community practice — Pack 1: Attentiveness, Pack 4: Responsiveness, and the 6-Pack of Care podcast.

The 6-Pack

The 6-Pack is an application of ⿻ Plurality to AI governance. Packs 1–4 form a feedback loop — the care cycle (Attentiveness → Responsibility → Competence → Responsiveness → back to Attentiveness). Pack 5 scales that loop across organisations. Pack 6 is the boundary condition that keeps every deployment local, plural, and sunset-ready. The unit of deployment is the Kami — a bounded local steward, not a universal governor.

Six design principles translate care ethics into something institutions can build and inspect:

• Pack 1: Attentiveness — what the people closest to the problem are seeing that institutions still miss.
• Pack 2: Responsibility — who is accountable, with what authority, and what happens if they fail.
• Pack 3: Competence — whether the system actually works in practice: audited, explainable, and safe to fail.
• Pack 4: Responsiveness — whether affected people can contest outcomes and force repair.
• Pack 5: Solidarity — whether the ecosystem rewards cooperation, exit, and public accountability over lock-in.
• Pack 6: Symbiosis — whether the system stays bounded, local, and sunset-ready instead of hardening into permanent rule.
• Measures — one headline public measure per pack, with supporting diagnostics.

Four proof points

• A public-policy case. "AI Alignment Cannot Be Top-Down" shows how Taiwan used an Alignment Assembly to respond to AI-enabled scam ads.
• A technical case. "Inside the Kami" argues that bounded, specialised systems are easier to govern than a general-purpose governor.
• A civic-practice case. "Ciudadanía Digital" and Podcast: AI and Democracy show how this work connects to participation, legitimacy, and everyday public problem-solving.
• A long-term care case. "Attentiveness in Long-Term Care AI" examines how a cross-sector collaboration co-produced a care-centric definition of responsible AI with the people closest to the problem.

The book widens these into seven case studies: Taiwan's Alignment Assemblies, Team Mirai in Japan, Engaged California, Monlam AI, the ROOST federated safety network — and two emerging projects whose stage the book is honest about. Dedicate is a community system taking root in the United Kingdom that helps unpaid carers find peers, experts, and local services in one place. Lifting the Voices of Older Persons is a global listening effort that sets out to gather older people's priorities in underserved communities, to inform a new convention on the rights of older persons being negotiated within the United Nations.

Publications

• "Safeguarding Sovereignty with Data as Soil": Audrey applies the 6-Pack of Care to enterprise AI — data is soil, not oil, and resilience comes from bounded local stewards under federated safety, rather than a single global brain. (First published by The Kyndryl Institute, 28 April 2026)
• "Sunset Section 230 and Unleash the First Amendment": Audrey, Jaron Lanier, and Allison Stanger argue for ending algorithmic amplification's liability shield while protecting human speech — the reach-not-speech reform at the heart of Pack 5. (Communications of the ACM, January 2026)
• "How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy": Audrey joins Maria Ressa, Nick Bostrom, Nicholas Christakis, and 19 other researchers to document how LLM-powered agent swarms can infiltrate communities and fabricate consensus at population scale. (Science, 2026)
• "Conversation Networks": Audrey, Deb Roy, and Lawrence Lessig propose civic communication infrastructure — interoperable apps with Civic AI guided by communities — as the technical layer beneath 6-Pack of Care. (McGill Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, March 2025)
• "Community by Design": Audrey and Glen Weyl with four co-authors propose rebuilding social platforms around social fabric — rewarding content that bridges communities rather than maximising engagement. The technical backbone behind Packs 1 and 5. (arXiv, February 2025)
• "Virtuous AI Can Free the Future": Audrey Tang on nurturing AI with civic virtue, the Internet of Beings, and why alignment must be a living, community-driven process. (Musashino University Centennial)
• "⿻Being": Tenzin Yangtso reflects on survival logic and life's meaning — matter and consciousness — and argues for a civic turn from extraction to cultivation. (March 2026)
• "⿻ A Gentle Bridge": Tenzin Yangtso & jdd-kami on the two forces of consciousness and matter, displaced relationship, and why proximity is a free public good. (March 2026)

Project

The project sits between a manifesto, a set of operational pack pages, and the book Civic AI: 6-Pack of Care, arriving with Wiley in February 2027. We presented the framework at the Civic AI Conference at Rhodes House, Oxford, on 25 March 2026 — that page has the agenda, selected talks, and the community's Polis sensemaking on AI and care.