Autonomy Data Unit
The computational wing of the Autonomy Institute

Data science, pointed at power.

Six data scientists and machine-learning engineers, doing public-interest data science with the kind of compute that used to sit behind a corporate budget.

Network analysis Economic modelling Document intelligence
The work

We read the documents no one else has the capacity to read, and turn them into evidence.

We sit inside the Autonomy Institute, building the pipelines that move filings, donations, contracts and job ads from scattered records into datasets you can actually question. Since 2020 we have done it for unions, charities, newsrooms and campaigners. The methods are frontier. The values are not for sale.
By the numbers

What it looks like when public-interest research runs on supercomputer-scale infrastructure.

0M+
job adverts tagged for AI exposure on the Isambard supercomputer, with the UK AI Security Institute
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documents read by LLM pipelines: annual reports, filings, transcripts, regulatory text
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projects shipped as reports, live tools and queryable datasets since 2020
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people on the team, working since the first Covid lockdown
Built with and for
AI Security Institute Joseph Rowntree Foundation Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Equity Unite the Union ITUC Good Law Project The Bureau of Investigative Journalism Centre for Investigative Journalism Future Economy Scotland Spotlight on Corruption TfL / GLA
Capabilities
01Network analysis We scrape filings, donations, contracts and the open web, then use LLMs to pull out the entities and the links between them. Scattered records become a map of who is connected to whom, and who benefits.
02Economic & labour modelling Microsimulation, input-output models and bespoke indices. We measure what policy debates assume but rarely quantify: landlord profits, regional deprivation, the price of a climate shock running through the food system.
03Document intelligence LLM extraction across millions of documents. We tag, classify and structure annual reports, job ads, regulatory filings and transcripts into datasets that can be searched, filtered and held up as evidence.
04Tools & data products Public-facing tools: searchable databases, trackers and indexes. The people who need the findings, a union organiser or an investigative reporter, can use them without a data team of their own.
Selected work

A decade of receipts, since 2020.

Full index, 60+ projects ↗
The unit

A small team inside a research institute.

No account managers, no growth team. You work directly with the people writing the code. We are part of the Autonomy Institute, an independent research organisation.

Get in touch

Have something you need to find out?

adu@autonomy.work
Tell us roughly what you are trying to find out and the shape of the data. We will come back on whether it is a fit and how we would approach it.