Cory Alpert

Cory Alpert’s work spans democratic participation, disaster response, war-crimes investigations and the White House. Now, as a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne, he examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping trust, political judgement and democratic power.

The connection between those worlds is clearer than it first appears. Alpert has spent much of his career working on the systems people rely upon when trust, information and institutions come under pressure.

In American politics, he helped expand democratic participation through voter-registration organisations that have contributed to more than six million new registered voters. He also worked on presidential campaigns for Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden, before spending three years in the Biden-Harris White House.

Outside politics, Cory Alpert has seen how institutions perform when they are tested. In 2015, he launched Columbia Relief following Hurricane Joaquin, developing a locally driven, technology-enabled model for disaster response that mobilised more than 10,000 volunteers. He later advised cities across the US on disaster-response portfolios through the US Conference of Mayors.

In 2022, that work took him to Ukraine. Alpert advised technology-enabled humanitarian operations and supported efforts to deploy tools for collecting evidence in war-crimes investigations. There, questions of technology, information and accountability were no longer theoretical.

Those experiences now inform his research into AI and democracy. Alpert examines the social and psychological consequences of human interaction with AI, and what happens when technologies increasingly shape how people understand information, form judgements and decide whom to trust.

His writing reveals a particular concern with the concentration of power. On AI, he has questioned what happens when a small number of companies gain increasing influence over the information people encounter and the choices they make. In his geopolitical analysis, he has explored a related problem: how dependence on a single ally can become a strategic vulnerability.

For Cory Alpert, these are different versions of the same question. How do societies retain agency when the systems they depend upon become too powerful, too centralised or too unpredictable?

That perspective gives his work an unusual breadth. He brings experience from inside government, democratic campaigns and conflict zones to one of the defining questions of the AI age: not simply what AI can do, but who retains the power to decide how it is used.