Who we are
Non-partisan, non-government research institute. We accept no state support. One thing matters: intellectual honesty.
This moment
It is time to put AI to work making government transparent.
Budgets are complicated. Spending decisions are opaque. The labyrinth of public-policy trade-offs has long served as good cover for waste, inefficiency, and politically convenient explanations. A budget of HUF 43,781 billion is something almost no one can read end to end. No single journalist can review 42 chapters and thousands of line items inside a single, coherent economic framework. This is not an accident — the fog has its beneficiaries.
AI changes that. Not by deciding for us — it cannot, and it should not. Democracy rests on human decisions, human values and human accountability. What AI can do is what no human team could do before: read everything, apply the same analytical framework to every line item, model the consequences of changes, and return the results in a form that citizens, journalists and decision-makers can actually use.
AI does not tell us what to value. But it does tell us, with unprecedented clarity, what the consequences of our decisions are — in the short term and the long.
In a democracy, this changes everything.
Mission
The Free Society Institute — Szabad Társadalom Intézet in Hungarian — fills a long-standing gap in Hungarian public life: credible, independently funded research that thinks from the market economy and the classical liberal tradition.
Two things guide us: transparency, and a willingness to name our own mistakes. We publish our arguments, our sources and our analytical process. We welcome criticism, counter-arguments and better ideas. The tradition we work in withstands scrutiny; we publish our conclusions precisely so that anyone can put them to the test.
Our publications are freely available to everyone, and we write them so that interested readers and specialists alike can use them. We do not replace human analysts or decision-makers: we strengthen and accelerate their work, so that better ideas can spread faster and weaker ones can be corrected sooner.
Govtech
The meeting of AI and public-policy analysis is one of the most important new frontiers in democratic governance. For the first time, a small independent team — with no state funding and no apparatus of several hundred staff — can produce the kind of comprehensive, rigorous public-finance analysis that, until now, only government bureaucracies or large international organisations could deliver. We show what this looks like in practice.
Our analysis of Hungary’s 2026 national budget is the proof: 42 chapters, thousands of line items, structured data outputs, a ten-year renewal programme, and a section-by-section comparison with the Tisza party programme — all produced by a multi-agent AI system, under a single analytical framework. We are building a model that any civil-society organisation can apply in any country, for any budget cycle, provided it is committed to transparency and evidence-based reform. The tools of serious public-finance analysis must not remain a privilege of power.
The people
Founder and Managing Director
AI researcher and data scientist. Managing Director of Neural Machines and DeepPolicy. He founded the Free Society Institute to put artificial intelligence to work for public-policy analysis — and designed the first AI-supported analysis of the Hungarian national budget.
Contributing researchers (open positions)
We are building a team of economists, data scientists and public-policy researchers who share our commitment to rigorous, principled analysis. If you have relevant expertise and would like to join the work, please get in touch.
Foundations
Our work is held together by four schools from the classical liberal tradition: Austrian economics, the ordoliberal tradition of the rule of law, public choice, and the institutional economics of North and Coase.
Markets, law and social norms emerge from voluntary human cooperation — not from central planning. We study how top-down intervention disrupts the price signals and local knowledge without which a complex economy cannot function.
Inflation is, in effect, a hidden tax. Deficit-financed spending passes the bill to future generations. We argue for balanced budgets, monetary restraint, and transparent fiscal rules that protect citizens’ purchasing power.
Prosperity depends on predictable rules applied equally to everyone — to government and citizen alike. We measure legislation and regulation against whether they uphold that principle.
Economic and personal freedom rest on the same foundation: the right to hold, use and transfer property peacefully. We oppose state expropriation, excessive licensing requirements, and any regulation that amounts to a taking in all but name.
Free Society Institute
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