Democracy, Rebuilt
OCTOBER 21-23, 2026
St James Theatre, Montreal
In the year since last year’s ATTENTION: Govern or be Governed convened 250 leaders in Montreal, the governance question has shifted under our feet. AI systems are no longer arriving; they are deploying, at scale, into the core functions of democratic life: decision-making in government, information production in journalism, knowledge work in the academy, organizing in civil society.
What follows will be a period of rapid social transformation, and with it the conditions to strain or social fabric: labour market shocks, epistemic disruption, reorganized public services, new patterns of political organization and contestation. Sovereignty over democratic institutions is not a given in this moment of rapid change. It is a posture democratic societies must now take, and a project they will have to pursue together.
Attention 2026 takes up this challenge. The conference convenes the people already doing this work from within the institutions themselves. Together we will work through two questions:
what democratic values and norms must be preserved as AI reshapes the functions around them;
what it would actually take to rebuild the institutional capacity to uphold them at the speed of the transition.
Through two days of plenary and a full day of facilitated workshops, Attention 2026 is designed to generate shared language, cross-border relationships, and policy instruments that give democratic institutions a meaningful foothold in the governance of AI.
Photographer: Edmond Chung
Conference Co-Chairs:
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João Brant
Secretary for Digital Policies at the Secretariat of Social Communication of the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil
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Maria Ressa
UN AI panel co-chair, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, journalist Columbia University
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Ethan Zuckerman
Professor and Director of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
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Hugo Larochelle
Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute
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Marietje Schaake
Tech-policy expert
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Ben Scott
CEO of Reset Tech
Event Speakers
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Katherine Maher
President & CEO, NPR
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Yoshua Bengio
Director, MILA
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Julie Inman Grant
eSafety Commissioner, Australia
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Ima Bello
Lawyer and Frontier AI governance Specialist
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Marc Miller
Member of Parliament, Government of Canada
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Gary Marcus
Scientist & Author
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Jiore Craig
Resident Senior Fellow, Digital Integrity, ISD Global
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Alex Bores
New York State Assembly
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Baroness Beeban Kidron
Member of UK House of Lords and Filmmaker
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Ali-Abbas Ali
Ofcam
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Jason Stanley
Professor of Philosophy and American Studies, Munk School, University of Toronto
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David Walmsley
Editor-in-Chief, Globe and Mail
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Sasha Havlicek
Co-founder, CEO, Institute for Strategic Dialogue
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Shoshana Zuboff
Author / Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School
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Joshua Tucker
Professor / Director, NYU Center for Social Media, AI and Politics
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Ravi Iyer
Managing Director, USC Marshall School's Neely Center
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Nina Jankowicz
CEO, American Sunlight Project
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Bruce Schneier
Security Technologist / Author
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Laura Marquez-Garrett
Attorney, Social Media Victims Law Center
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Valerie Pisano
President and CEO, Mila
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Anya Schiffrin
Professor, Columbia University, SIPA
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Liz Moody
Strategic Advisor, Musical AI
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Michelle Ringuette
Assistant to the President, American Federation of Teachers
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Rebecca Finlay
CEO, Partnership on AI
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Edward Tsoi
Co-Founder, AI Safety Asia
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Taylor Owen
Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communication, and Founding Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, McGill University
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D. Graham Burnett
Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and History of Science
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Camille Francois
Researcher, Columbia University SIPA
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Andrew Strait
Economic Democracy Fund
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Jennifer Maisel
Partner/Co-chair, AI Practice Team
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David Evan Harris
Researcher, Berkeley, Brennan Center for Justice
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Ava Smithing
Founding Partner & CEO at The Attention Studio
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Rob Flaherty
Former Assistant to the President and White House Director of Digital Strategy (Biden Administration)
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Jim Balsillie
Former Chair and CEO, Research In Motion
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Aengus Bridgman
Director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory
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Anna Jahn
Executive Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University
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Mallory McMorrow
Senator, Michigan State
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Vass Bednar
Managing Director of the Canadian Shield Institute
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Dawn Nakagawa
Berggruen Institute
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Alex Munter
CEO, Canadian Medical Association
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Gil Duran
Journalist/Author
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Alan Minsky
Executive Director, Progressive Democrats of America
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Nick King
Associate Professor, Trottier Institute for Science and Public Policy
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Jennifer Welsh
Director, Max Bell School of Public Policy
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Emily Laidlaw
Canada Research Chair and Law Professor
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Janet Haven
Executive Director, Data & Society
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Tomicah Tillemann
CEO, Pro-Human AI Coalition
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Phillip Trippenbach
Strategy Director, Seismic Foundation
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Jane Taber
National Public Relations
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Rónán Ó Domhnaill
Media Development Commissioner, CnaM
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Justin Hendrix
Tech Polilcy Press