Active Society, Politics & Law Computing & AI

ROSALIE - RespOnSible ArtificiaL Intelligence Ecosystems - Comparing the UK and Germany

Funder AHRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation University of Nottingham
Funding £353K
Period Dec 2025 — Dec 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Germany and the UK are both building national AI strategies, but no one has systematically compared how responsibility for AI’s consequences actually works inside those two very different ecosystems. The problem is that while everyone talks about “ethical AI,” the concept of an AI ecosystem remains vague. It is not clear how cultural and institutional differences—such as Germany’s stronger data protection laws or the UK’s more market-driven approach—shape who gets blamed, who takes credit, and who is accountable when an AI system causes harm. ROSALIE fills this gap by treating AI not as a technology but as a socio-technical system embedded in specific national contexts. If the project succeeds, it will produce a detailed map of how responsibility is perceived, attributed, and enacted across the two countries. This could directly inform how governments design funding conditions, regulatory frameworks, and oversight mechanisms for AI. For example, a UK regulator might learn from Germany’s approach to stakeholder engagement, or a German ministry might adopt elements of the UK’s faster innovation pipeline without sacrificing accountability. The 30 expert interviews, 10 in-depth case studies, and cross-national workshops will generate concrete, evidence-based recommendations rather than abstract principles. This is applied, comparative social science. It will not build a better algorithm, but it could reshape the rules under which algorithms are built and deployed.

View original technical description
Questions concerning ethical aspects of AI continue to be dominant in academic discourses as well as national policy, professional, and organisation discussions. The conceptualisation of AI as socio-technical ecosystems is widely used but its implications for questions of ethics and responsibility are not well understood. The ROSALIE project will make a crucial contribution to discussions of ethics and responsibility in AI by providing a conceptually sound and empirically rich analysis of how responsibility is perceived, attributed and enacted across different AI ecosystems. A comparative study exploring the differences and similarities between German and UK AI ecosystems will be undertaken to identify defining features of such ecosystems that influence responsibility. The comparative methodology will be informed by a conceptual analysis of normative positions in AI ethics. This will be complemented by a stakeholder analysis and a detailed study of research and funding conditions (30 Expert interviews, 15 each country; 3 Stakeholder Focus Groups with participants of both countries). The project will undertake 10 in-depth case studies on organizations (5 UK and 5 Germany) (document analysis and 3-5 expert interviews each case). The overall comparative analysis of the UK and German AI ecosystems and their constituent components (also 2 Workshops with respectively 3-5 experts from each country) will provide answers to our research questions of how AI ecosystems emerge in relation to specific cultural-institutional boundary conditions and how ethical and responsibility questions are identified, interpreted and addressed in such ecosystems.

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Researchers

Bernd Stahl (Principal Investigator)Helena Webb (Co-Investigator)Lydia Farina (Co-Investigator)Stefan Boeschen (Co-Investigator)

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Original classification

Research Grant

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