New research led by Trinity College Dublin’s AI Accountability Lab at the ADAPT Centre and the School of Computer Science and Statistics pinpoints the growing threat posed by the influence AI companies have over the rule of law, and people’s lives, as well as outlining how society can stem the tide.
The international team behind the work, which comprised researchers based in Ireland, the United States, Scotland and The Netherlands, mapped the growing and outsized influence that the “Big AI” industry exerts on the capture and control of the narrative, and of the regulatory measures related to AI and its ever-growing use in society.
After taking a deep dive into literature and media reports, the multi-disciplinary team identified 27 established patterns of “corporate capture”, a process by which regulation and public bodies come to act in the interest of corporations rather than people.
Applying their classification to a dataset of 100 articles, specifically published around four critical events between 2023 and 2025 (the EU AI Act trilogues and the global AI summits in the UK, South Korea and France), they found 249 cases fitting capture patterns.
Of these instances, the most prevalent relate to: 1) Narrative capture, dominated by narratives such as “regulation stifles innovation” and “red tape” whereby regulation is portrayed as unnecessary, excessive, or obsolete; and 2) Elusion of law, pertaining to violations and contentious interpretations of antitrust, privacy, copyright and labour laws.
Image by Jamillah Knowles & We and AI / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Adapted (cropped) for this use.
How does Big AI exert such influence?
Growing evidence, outlined in the research, suggests that Big AI has undermined and resisted regulation, oversight and enforcement in a variety of ways, such as lobbying; retaliated against whistleblowers, researchers and law-makers; and benefited in some cases from a “revolving door” model where former policymakers go on to advise or take employment with major AI companies.
There are also many examples of Big AI making significant donations to political parties, public officials owning equity in regulated companies, while some governments and political leaders have also set the stage to undermine existing rules. For example, after previously calling for “simplification”, in October 2025 EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen explicitly advocated for deregulation.
Dr Abeba Birhane, Director of Trinity’s AI Accountability Lab, based in the ADAPT Research Ireland Centre and Trinity’s School of Computer Science and Statistics, led the new research. She said: “In addition to ‘narrative capture’ and the violations and contentious interpretations of antitrust, privacy, copyright and labour laws that were most recurrent, we also found that Big AI frequently uses the notion that ‘regulation stifles innovation’ and that ‘red tape can stymy national interest’ to rationalise their control of the overall narrative.”
Zeerak Talat, one of the co-authors from the University of Edinburgh, added: “The regulatory and oversight structures and processes that govern the industry deeply impact everything from fostering public trust in systems marketed as AI to the credibility of scientific knowledge, and from educational and healthcare services to information ecosystems, the environment, rule of law and even the integrity of democratic processes.”
What is the potential impact of this research?
Over the past decade, the AI industry has come to exert an unprecedented economic, political and societal power and influence. And that continues to grow.
This work: 1) provides a new framework for understanding and identifying the many different ways in which Big AI controls the narrative and influences associated regulatory measures; and 2) categorises the most prevalent mechanisms in which the industry does that.
Riccardo Angius, PhD Researcher in the AIAL at Trinity, added: “This work provides policymakers and other researchers with rigorous context to comprehend the extent and depth of the pervasive and multifaceted capture of AI regulation by corporate actors. It calls into question the looming wholesale replacement of public services with black-box automation, threatening the independence of citizen rights, social welfare and regulatory agencies from corporate interests.”
Dr Birhane added: “This is an urgent call to action for researchers and policymakers to work together to address this growing threat, and to hold Big AI to account.”
Roel Dobbe, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, said: “In a practical sense this might take the form of increased public investment in civil society efforts to document and expose the breadth and extent of capture mechanisms being used, pressuring regulators for increased transparency and accountability in the rule-making processes, and implementing declarations of conflict of interest in regulatory processes in addition to major conference and scientific publication venues in relation to work on the societal impacts of AI.”
What can we learn from other industries?
The paper highlights lessons to be learned from adjacent movements in similar industries such as Big Tobacco, Pharma and Oil on some of the tactics used to prevent capture.
These include calls for separation between public and private interests and binding rules for government-industry interactions to manage conflicts-of-interests. Transferable lessons from climate justice advocacy can be applied to inform public opinion and improve media representation through coalition-building, litigation and public pressure on regulators.
The paper also puts forward intervention points for resistance and existing efforts that promote alternative regulatory interests and counter narratives particularly from civil society organisations, independent investigative journalism, independent audits of the AI technologies, and efforts that centre labour movements and marginalised communities.
The work will be presented at the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’26) in June 2026. A preprint can be accessed at: https://hdl.handle.net/2262/112901.
