The registry is a frame of institutions, not a record of AI use. It exists to define the population that the observatory’s data collection runs against, so that coverage and absence can both be measured against something fixed. It is built and maintained entirely independently of any finding about any institution.
- Inclusion does not mean the institution has been searched.
- Inclusion does not mean anything about the institution has been reviewed.
- Inclusion does not mean the institution has been found to use generative AI.
- Inclusion does not mean the institution has been found not to use it.
The consequence runs the other way too, and it is the more important half. An institution with no activity recorded against it is not thereby an institution that does not use AI. Most often it simply reflects where collection has and has not reached. Absence of a record is not a negative finding, and it should never be read or reported as one.
A record’s evidence state (whether anything has been looked for, and what was found) is a separate matter from its presence here, and it is described in the observatory’s own terms on Review states. This page does not restate that vocabulary, to avoid a second set of words for the same thing.
Vintage and versioning
Every count on these registry pages belongs to the build stamped on The shape of the coverage and to no other. The registry is rebuilt as new national registers are compiled and existing ones are revised, and each rebuild carries its own identifier, which is stamped onto every record it produces. A figure quoted from these pages without its build is a figure with no meaning attached, because the next build will move it.
Movement between builds can be substantial and is not always a correction. The build immediately preceding this one held 706,247 institutions; this one holds 719,588. The difference is 13,341 records, and it is not an error that was fixed: it is the addition of US school districts, a category the earlier build did not cover at all. Growth in this registry usually means the frame has been extended, not that it was previously wrong.
Movement is not always growth either. On 25 August 2026 a correction moved 386 institutions out of a stronger published claim into a weaker one, with no change to the frame and nothing searched again. That correction was to the evidence states rather than to this registry, and it is described where those states are defined, on Review states.
Coverage country by country
The shape of the coverage shows the registry in aggregate. The level of detail a reader actually needs to check our coverage of a particular country (which levels and institution types we hold for it, how many of each, and the specific register each block of records came from) runs to 2,907 rows across 225 countries and territories. That is a data view, not page copy, and pasting it here would put a table that goes stale on the next rebuild into a page that nobody rebuilds.
For this release it is published instead as the coverage codebook: a single downloadable document, regenerated from the same master build as the figures on The shape of the coverage, containing the full country-by-country tables at level × type × count, with the actual source cited inline for every block of records. It is exact, it is dated, and it stays consistent with those figures because both come from one build.
- Registry coverage codebook
- Open the full country-by-country coverage tables (HTML)
Serving the same view from the observatory’s API is the better long-term answer, since it would stay current without a rebuild of these pages. It is not what we are doing for this release: it would add a data-contract dependency to a page that is otherwise prose, and it queues behind other API work. It remains open as a later alternative.