Measuring What Matters: The AI Pluralism Index

Abstract: Artificial intelligence systems increasingly mediate knowledge, communication, and decision making. Development and governance remain concentrated within a small set of firms and states, raising concerns that technologies may encode narrow interests and limit public agency. Capability benchmarks for language, vision, and coding are common, yet public, auditable measures of pluralistic governance are rare. We define AI pluralism as the degree to which affected stakeholders can shape objectives, data practices, safeguards, and deployment. We present the AI Pluralism Index (AIPI), a transparent, evidence-based instrument that evaluates producers and system families across four pillars: participatory governance, inclusivity and diversity, transparency, and accountability. AIPI codes verifiable practices from public artifacts and independent evaluations, explicitly handling "Unknown" evidence to report both lower-bound ("evidence") and known-only scores with coverage. We formalize the measurement model; implement a reproducible pipeline that integrates structured web and repository analysis, external assessments, and expert interviews; and assess reliability with inter-rater agreement, coverage reporting, cross-index correlations, and sensitivity analysis. The protocol, codebook, scoring scripts, and evidence graph are maintained openly with versioned releases and a public adjudication process. We report pilot provider results and situate AIPI relative to adjacent transparency, safety, and governance frameworks. The index aims to steer incentives toward pluralistic practice and to equip policymakers, procurers, and the public with comparable evidence.