Ask anyone familiar with the Berkman Klein Center what makes it special, and you will hear a common refrain: the community. Over more than 25 years, that community has helped define the Center’s interdisciplinary approach and its focus on careful, applied inquiry at the intersection of technology and society. Today, BKC’s global community is woven throughout the Center’s research and programming and continues to convene, collaborate, and share knowledge beyond formal Center activities.
“BKC might be at Harvard, but what makes it special is the people in it. My cohort had some amazing people that shaped my AI policy understanding of my work. Beyond their intellectual prowess, what made a huge difference was their kindness and openness.”
SAHANA UDUPA
Fellow 2024–2025, Faculty Associate 2025–2026
Moving Forward with a Shared Direction
To open the 2025–2026 academic year, the Berkman Klein Center welcomed to Cambridge nearly 100 new and returning community members from around the world for its annual Launch event. The gathering sparked connection, strengthened relationships, and integrated participants into projects and programs across the Center, including the Applied Social Media Lab and BKC’s growing work on agentic AI.
Executive Director Alex Pascal reaffirmed human dignity and agency as guiding principles of the Center’s work. Launch also reflected BKC’s longstanding commitment to principled dialogue. Founder Charlie Nesson led a session that encouraged participants to consider how courage, vulnerability, and respectful disagreement can sustain healthy, productive discourse—setting a shared tone for the year ahead.
Launching BKCircle
In the spring, BKC launched BKCircle, a new forum designed to strengthen ties between the Center’s active community members and its expansive alumni network. The initiative was shaped by extensive community input gathered throughout the prior year.
Through dozens of hybrid activities, many of which leverage Center-developed discourse tools such as NextSpace, BKCircle has further connected former and current community members. These gatherings create space to surface shared questions, exchange feedback, celebrate new research, ask hard questions, and build collective skills.
Community members have hosted BKCircle sessions on topics ranging from communication security and innovator dilemmas to internet archival practices, malicious artificial general intelligence, and the governmental use of emerging technologies, reinforcing a sense of continuity and collaboration across generations of the BKC network.
Aligning Fellows with Research
This year’s fellows include Sean McGregor, whose work focuses on verification, evaluation, and the organizational infrastructures that shape how AI systems are built and governed, and Hayley Song, whose research bridges geometry, machine learning, and responsible AI to better understand how complex models behave. Continuing his fellowship from 2024–2025, Jim Cowie leads the Internet History Initiative, an effort to preserve, contextualize, and curate historical internet datasets as a public resource for research and accountability. Together, their work reflects BKC’s focus on advancing AI research while addressing accountability and governance.
“Spending a year at BKC was like stepping into a whirlwind of ideas. Surrounded by an amazing cohort of fellows and in-house experts, the policy and technical aspects of AI came into sharper view, helping me to complete a new book on AI and extreme speech.”
UPOL EHSAN
Fellow 2024–2025, Faculty Associate 2025–2026
Sharing Expertise
Being part of the BKC community means access to shared expertise and learning, alongside and with scholars and practitioners from around the world and a wide range of disciplines. Here are some of the topics BKC community members approached together in 2025:
Teaching Tomorrow’s Technology Leaders
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