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Māori Data Sovereignty and the Fragility of Borrowed AI
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…
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Human Oversight in Automated Decision Making
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…
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Ministry’s AI Guidance- wrong Māori advise
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and consequential gap: its treatment of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori data sovereignty is underdeveloped, incorrect, outdated, and structurally undermined by the absence of Māori voices in…
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NZ FTA with India – dangers for Māori
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 It was not repealed until 1962.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…
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Replacing public servants with AI – costs to Māori
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…
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Māori Privacy Survey Findings
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…
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AI Agents and Legal Personhood in New Zealand
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…
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Google DeepMind hires ‘philosopher’ to work on machine consciousness
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,…
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Human Resilience with AI
I was honoured to be one of the 386 international AI ethics experts to contribute a short essay to the “Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI: Experts Call for Radical Change Across Institutions, Social Structures” report and contribute a Te Ao Māori perspective to the Epistemic Vigilance: Discerning Truth, Illusion and…
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Briscoes and Rebel Sport FRT with no visible Māori consultation
As facial recognition technology (FRT) is gradually being implemented across New Zealand’s retail landscape, a troubling gap has emerged in how one of the country’s major retailers is handling its rollout. With only internal notices, Briscoes Group operator of Briscoes Homeware and Rebel Sport has been trialling FRT across 18 North Island stores since September…
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AI Bias with Māori in Job Interviews
The past few days we are hearing about AI and recruitment issues with you a young man who faced bias. I am increasingly concerned that the media is not giving Māori any consideration with their AI bias stories, relying on academics for opinions and for them to talk about us like we are not capable…
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Meta’s Digital Ghost Patent
Meta’s Digital Ghost Patent: A Te Ao Māori Analysis IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR FACEBOOK AND META USERS On 30 December 2025, Meta was granted a United States patent that would allow its platforms to use Artificial Intelligence to construct a digital simulation of you, trained on your posts, messages, voice recordings, browsing history, and purchases and…
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Kaupapa Māori AI Framework
I am excited to release, perhaps the world’s first Indigenous Peoples AI Framework for understanding and describing the nature of an Artificial Intelligence (AI). Drawing on mātauranga Māori, tikanga Māori, and te reo Māori, the framework is encapsulated in the whakatauāki :He Tangata, He Karetao, He Ātārangi” (A person, a puppet, a shadow). Each term describes…
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Facial Recognition, Algorithmic Bias, and Compounded Harm to Māori and Pacific Communities
A new paper I’ve written looks at Foodstuffs South Island’s facial recognition trial in Christchurch and raises serious questions about who bears the risk. The three trial stores sit in suburbs where Māori and Pacific populations are well below the city average. The stores excluded from the trial are in the suburbs with the highest…
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Responsible AI in New Zealand
New Zealand has developed a comprehensive suite of AI governance instruments, including the Algorithm Charter (Stats NZ, 2020), Privacy Act 2020, Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Act 2023, Biometric Processing Privacy Code 2025 (Office of the Privacy Commissioner, 2025), and responsible AI guidance for both public and private sectors (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment,…
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Māori AI and Unequal Futures
The New Zealand Reserve Bank released a report “Assessing AI and Robotics Exposure in the New Zealand Labour Market Using Large Language Models“. The analysis finds that Māori workers appear to have lower exposure to AI and robotics than other groups. While this may initially seem positive, it risks being misinterpreted. In the report, higher AI…
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Māori likely to see graphic or extreme content
The 2026 Online Exposure: Experiences of Extreme or Illegal Content in Aotearoa report from the Classification Office provides a comprehensive look at the prevalence and impact of extreme or illegal online content within New Zealand. This report examines the experiences of extreme or illegal content among various age groups and how it affects the population.…
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AI blackface – Is te ao Māori next?
A social media wildlife expert called a First Nations version of Steve Irwin drew a large following that The Guardian exposed the account as an AI-generated character. A South African content creator reportedly ran the operation from New Zealand. Indigenous experts have described the account as AI and digital blackface: modern racial impersonation that simulates…
