AI governance tips, resources and media commentary about all matters that relate to AI governance topics for all New Zealand organisations.
This is a copy of a post I wrote for Verfassungsblog Symposium in the series Thinking Machines, Thinking Lawyers. The title is “What AI Cannot See; Indigenous Legal Knowledge and the Future of Legal Scholarship”. The original article and credits are here. Background In the article I ask whose law AI systems know. Large language … Read more
Māori are named in only about a third of New Zealand news stories about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Māori are talked about, but rarely heard. When you count who is quoted, Māori technology, rights and data sovereignty voices make up just 3% of media articles. This creates an issue where Māori societal harms, opportunities and benefits … Read more
What is a social licence? A social licence to operate (SLO) is the ongoing acceptance or approval that an organisation receives from communities and other groups affected by its activities. It is different from formal legal permission. A social licence reflects trust and credibility built through responsible practices, ethical behaviour and meaningful engagement. The idea … Read more
Voyager Broadband‘s (Actrix Networks, 1st Domains / Affordable Domains / Register Direct) latest advertisement (via RNZ) shows two Māori/Pacific men, one of whom is attacking a Pākehā man by having him in a chocker hold on the floor, after their internet drops out during a UFC match on the television. The advert was made with … Read more
This article explores a proposed Māori led framework for datacentre development. Using a Māori owned and developed framework using environmental protections that are interwoven in tikanga Māori that respect and utilise the New Zealand environment. It argues that by doing so, New Zealand could sustainably cater to the development of AI and Data centres. This … Read more
This post analyses public preferences of the use of GenAI in the policy decision-making process across New Zealand and compares non-New Zealand Māori to other New Zealand’s preferences. The methodology is at the end of the article. Public preferences of the use of GenAI in the policy decision-making process across New Zealand. Each column is … Read more
There is an urgent need for marae to implement new kawa and tikanga to protect the people form anonymously being AI’s training data. Camera glasses (pervert glasses) now sold at Kmart for ninety-nine dollars, and other more expensive glasses with facial recognition updates, recording video and stills, wired to an AI assistant are about to … Read more
My ongoing investigation of scraped and stolen Māori knowledge by AI has identified more than 80 Māori authors, 8 non Māori kaupapa Māori authors (194 plus titles) and song artists; 100’s of videos from Te Karere TVNZ and Marae TV sourced primarily from YouTube, Māori academics articles published in Elsevier and JSTOR, including texts from … Read more
This week Google Maps began rolling out a New Zealand voice that pronounces te reo Māori place names correctly. Place name Whangārei with the soft “f” sound from an New Zealand dialect, Taupō with the long vowel, Karangahape Road spoken as it was named by our tūpuna, not as decades of navigation systems and generations … Read more
Too often in New Zealand, AI safety folk (who usually have a high level of privilege or are detached from vulnerable communities), will reference international AI stories highlighting harms while being oblivious to local harm stories. This is important from the perspective that New Zealand is not immune from AI harms and it helps politicians … Read more
Anthropic the company behind the Claude AI received with no warning or explanation, a directive directing them to immediately suspend access to their Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for all foreign nationals in America and all non-Americans on the planet, . This included New Zealand who had access for several days prior. “Fable 5 … Read more
The New Zealand media continue to report on AI harms from a western, academic, middle-class perspective while continuing to make invisible communities silent and ignored. This is a te ao Māori perspective of the recent MSD automated Decision Making law that was passed, delving deep into community harms for Māori. I have spent years documenting … Read more
The Ministry for Regulation’s Responsible AI in Action guidance (May 2026) represents a credible foundation for regulators engaging with Artificial Intelligence. However, the guidance contains a significant and consequential gap: its treatment of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori data sovereignty is underdeveloped, incorrect, outdated, and structurally undermined by the absence of Māori voices in … Read more
In 1907, the New Zealand Government passed an Act with a single purpose: to suppress tohunga and the traditional Māori knowledge and beliefs they held. It was not repealed until 1962. This was in addition to the Natives Schools Act, repression of reo Māori and culture and other systematic cultural erasure. I grew up seeing … Read more
The current coalition government has announced the elimination of approximately 8,700 public sector positions or 14% of the public workforce alongside NZ$2.4 billion in spending reductions over three years, with AI deployed as the replacement mechanism. The PSA has been direct in its assessment: AI is being used as a justification for politically driven job … Read more
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s 2026 survey on privacy concerns and the use of personal information tells a story that New Zealand policymakers, technologists, and public institutions would do well to read carefully. More than half of all New Zealanders, 52 percent say they are concerned about their individual privacy. Among Māori, that figure … Read more
In this article I extend my earlier analysis of Māori cultural perspectives on AI sentience and legal personhood to the specific and urgent case of agentic AI systems, those capable of autonomous, persistent, goal directed action across digital environments. I argue that Mead’s tikanga Māori framework that I have previously applied to static AI models … Read more
As AI systems grow more capable, companies appear increasingly willing to look beyond traditional engineering disciplines for guidance on questions that touch on consciousness, identity and what it means to interact meaningfully with a machine. On 13 April 2026, Google DeepMind announced it had hired philosopher Henry Shevlin to study machine consciousness, human AI relationships, … Read more