Environmental Impact

Jon Ippolito, Professor at the University of Maine, has developed an app called What Uses More to explore the environmental footprint of various digital activities (including AI prompts but also other practices, e.g. watching Netflix). His app encourages users to consider and understand electrical and water usage required by AI

Open Source LLM’s

The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) has released a fully open-source large language model OLMo 2 designed to help researchers better understand how AI works and among other possibilities allows academic and researchers one way to experiment and engage the issue “interpretability” (or the current failure to understand how AI works).

Industry Self-Reporting

Mistral recently published a comprehensive lifecycle of AI (July 2025). 

Anthology (Blackboard’s parent company) released a white paper, The Environmental Impact of AI in Education: Cutting Through the Noise, and have pledged to report on the environmental impact of the use of AI in their products and to launch a carbon offset program.

AI companies have an obvious vested interest in self-reporting. To further complicate such commitments, US and EU have different AI regulatory environments.