KGI’s Agentic Information Future initiative focuses on how AI agents are rapidly transforming the information ecosystem – from how information is produced and distributed to how it is discovered and consumed. The initiative explores the implications on information quality, market concentration, and media sustainability, while bringing together experts to generate empirical evidence and forward-looking analysis to inform debates spanning technology standardization and open source development, competition policy, and media policy.
The development of agentic AI creates the prospect for the internet’s de facto information gatekeepers – social media and search – to be seriously disrupted, if not replaced, by AI agents acting as the new information synthesizers. A world where news and knowledge is increasingly delivered to us proactively by personalized agents, rather than in response to our own searching or scrolling or browsing, raises fundamental questions about every aspect of information production, delivery, and consumption.
Can we sustain the web as we’ve known it, where humans can continue to access news and knowledge directly from original sources, while growing an agentic web of high-quality information in parallel? Can technical and economic mechanisms be built into the agentic web to support better societal outcomes than what the advertising-supported, attention-maximizing web and mobile ecosystems have delivered? Against a backdrop of breathtaking accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small number of giant AI companies, can the design of nascent agentic AI markets build in protections against abuses of market power?
KGI’s Agentic Information Future initiative aims to address these pressing questions by convening experts and generating insights that respond to the rapidly evolving role of AI agents in the information ecosystem. The initiative is being designed to clarify this dynamic space and deliver empirical evidence and comprehensive analysis to inform technical and policy debates spanning technology standardization and open source development, competition policy, and media policy.
This initiative builds on KGI’s search competition work, which examines regulatory scrutiny of Google’s dominance and the implementation of competition enforcement regimes across different jurisdictions. Policy, technology, and business questions about nascent agentic information delivery paradigms are in many ways intertwined with market and enforcement dynamics in the search industry, while raising many novel considerations that extend beyond search
As this initiative develops, KGI will convene experts, produce comprehensive analysis, and release practical resources to inform emerging debates on agentic AI policy and technology. Early outputs include:
KGI’s Age Assurance Rules provides practical recommendations for designing age assurance rules that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, service availability, competition, and openness.
KGI’s Assigning Responsibility for Age Assurance examines how policymakers can allocate responsibility for age assurance across the digital ecosystem. It provides practical recommendations for assigning age assurance obligations in ways that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, competition, accessibility, and openness.
/
KGI’s Measuring Risk II report examines what EU risk assessments and US litigation reveal about Snap and YouTube’s approaches to risks on their platforms, with a particular focus on risks to minors. The report explores the gap between what these platforms publicly disclose about risk mitigation and what has emerged through discovery in US litigation, including their own internal research, product development, and risk evaluation.
/
The appeals of the United States v. Google search antitrust case turn in part on whether the remedies ordered address Google’s illegal monopoly in search – or whether, by declining to ban the payments Google makes for search defaults, the District Court has left the conduct at the heart of the case largely intact. In Pay for Half, KGI’s Alissa Cooper joins leading economists and competition experts in showing how the court can reasonably cap those payments rather than ban them, opening at least half of the market to rivals, including emerging AI-powered entrants, while preserving revenue for distribution partners.
/
As the European Commission advances efforts under the Digital Markets Act to require Google to share its search data with competitors, lessons from historic antitrust remedies underscore how data access could be transformational in the AI-powered search market. While the Commission’s proposals represent a novel and comprehensive approach, key improvements to data scope and sharing frequency, privacy protections, and dispute resolution are needed. US courts and enforcers charged with implementing similar provisions should take note.
/
As lawsuits involving AI, social media, privacy, competition, and platform accountability expand worldwide, courts are emerging as central actors shaping technology governance. A new tech litigation tracker developed by the Knight-Georgetown Institute, Tech Justice Law, and Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture & Technology program centralizes and tracks technology-related litigation and regulatory actions across jurisdictions and issue areas.
