The Data Is the Model: Jose M. Plehn’s Vision for Verifiable AI and Civil Society
Artificial intelligence continues to astonish the world with its expanding, awe-inspiring capabilities. But, beneath the spectacular headlines lies a quieter, more enduring revolution — the struggle for verifiable data. For Jose M. Plehn, Ph.D., an academic turned data entrepreneur, the real future
Artificial intelligence continues to astonish the world with its expanding, awe-inspiring capabilities. But, beneath the spectacular headlines lies a quieter, more enduring revolution — the struggle for verifiable data. For Jose M. Plehn, Ph.D., an academic turned data entrepreneur, the real future of AI lies in data veracity. Dr. Plehn is the founder of BrightQuery, an innovative data analytics service provider. He is also the founder of OpenData.org, and a board member of the AI Alliance. Plehn and many of his peer data experts believe that the real future of AI will be defined not by how many parameters data models contain, but by the trustworthiness of the data that feeds them.¹
Plehn’s argument sounds deceptively simple: “AI will only be as honest as its sources,” he quibbles. His company, BrightQuery, founded in 2019, converts legal, regulatory, and tax filings from over 100,000 jurisdictions worldwide into structured, machine-readable datasets.² The result is a vast economic map linking hundreds of millions of entities—companies, individuals, and locations—grounded in verified public records. It is the kind of factual infrastructure that large language models (LLMs) increasingly depend on to reduce hallucinations and bias.
The concept Plehn champions most forcefully is provenance —knowing where data comes from, how it was structured, and under what authority it was published.³ Without it, even the most sophisticated AI systems operate in epistemic fog. His view echoes emerging global standards such as FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable),⁴ and the Data Provenance Standards promoted by the Data & Trust Alliance and OASIS Open.⁵⁶
“Every claim made by a model should be traceable to a verifiable record,” Plehn has said in interviews.⁷ BrightQuery’s platform and its work with the National Secure Data Service (NSDS), a federal project, aim to make government data secure and accessible across agencies.⁸