Real-World Gaps in AI Governance Research
Drawing on 1,178 safety and reliability papers within a corpus of 9,439 generative-AI papers (January 2020 – March 2025), we compare the research outputs of leading AI companies (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI) with leading AI universities (CMU, MIT, NYU, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Washington). Corporate research increasingly concentrates on pre-deployment topics — alignment, testing, and evaluation — while attention to deployment-stage issues such as bias, hallucinations, copyright, and persuasive or addictive design has waned. We recommend expanding external-researcher access to deployment data and building systematic observability of in-market AI behaviour.
