The promise of autonomous agentic AI requires significant changes in the governance landscape. Parents of young children face a lot of fears about developmental milestones, from infancy through adulthood. The number of months it takes a baby to learn to talk or walk is often used as a benchmark for wellness, or an indicator of additional tests needed to properly diagnose a potential health condition. A parent rejoices over the child's first steps and then realizes how much has changed when the child can quickly walk outside, instead of slowly crawling in a safe area inside. Suddenly safety, including childproofing, takes a completely different lens and approach. Generative AI hit toddlerhood between December 2025 and January 2026 with the introduction of no code tools from multiple vendors and the debut of OpenClaw, an open source personal agent posted on GitHub.

Public scrutiny is critical for trust in, and democratic legitimacy for, the use of data-driven decision-making and algorithmic systems in our society. We stand at the intersection of monumental and ongoing ruptures that will transform the data governance landscape. If they are to have a positive long-term influence it will be because we have heeded their lessons. The Royal Society's new publication, The UK data governance landscape, is a valuable resource published at a moment of immense uncertainty, as well as possibility, in the data governance ecosystem. Midway through 2020 we stand at the intersection of three monumental and ongoing ruptures: the coronavirus pandemic, which is accelerating the application of data-driven technologies (PDF) to health as well as policymaking; the Black Lives Matter movement, which is drawing long-overdue attention to the unequal distribution of the benefits of digital transformation as well the problem of bias in algorithmic systems (PDF); and the impending departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, which is generating questions about the future of international data flows and the opportunities the UK faces to expand its leadership in artificial intelligence (AI).