CONCEPT
AI Industrial Policy (Mazzucato Framework)
The deployment of public investment, regulatory frameworks, and institutional design to direct AI development toward public purposes rather than leaving direction to commercial logic alone.
AI industrial policy, in Mazzucato's framework, is the deliberate use of state capacity to shape the direction, distribution, and institutional architecture of the AI transition. It is not regulation in the conventional sense — rules that constrain private behavior — but the active construction of the conditions under which AI development serves public purposes. The framework integrates mission-oriented investment, conditionality on public support, windfall taxation, public AI infrastructure, and return-sharing mechanisms into a coordinated industrial strategy. Mazzucato's argument is that the choice is not between innovation and regulation but between undirected innovation (which the commercial logic of platform companies will direct toward the highest private returns) and directed innovation (which public investment and institutional design can direct toward applications that address social challenges).
In The You On AI Field Guide
Mazzucato has been explicit about the institutional mechanisms required. In her February 2025 essay with Tommaso Valletti, she argued that while AI could deliver profound benefits for all