AI Regulation Across the Atlantic and Beyond
Panel assembled by the organization from individual submissions.
A wave of Executive Orders from the United States on AI proclaim, and seek to secure, American “global AI dominance” – not merely global leadership - as a core value in the short-term. Despite being voted down as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a moratorium on AI legislation by the U.S. States has been imposed by Executive Order 14365 of 11 December 2025. The prohibition on all AI-related legislation not concerned with child safety or AI infrastructure, seeks to counter the ‘Brussels effect’ on States’ AI regulatory initiatives, given that, at the federal level, the US perceives law and regulation to be anathema to innovation. At the same time, 20 US states have adopted comprehensive data privacy legislation, and several more have similar GDPR-inspired legislation under consideration. The debate has become transatlantic, with the US actively opposing digital regulation in the EU and its Member States. The simplification and delegalisation debates taking place in the EU around the Digital Omnibus, combined with increased use of soft law in EU digitisation law and policy, including external relations, are argued here to be seen as a product of a “Washington effect” and a process of the enhanced presidentialization of the EU system.
These debates matter on account of the fragility of the key legal instruments of EU-US relations that are significantly eg EU-US Transatlantic Privacy Framework.
The paper explores, form an institutional and temporal perspective, the question of transatlantic divergence and convergence in law and policy-making with shifts in administration.
This presentation examines the emerging constitutional and regulatory conflict between U.S. member states and the federal government over authority to govern artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on comprehensive analysis of federal executive orders, state legislation across all fifty states, and regulatory guidance documents from global AI policy databases, this research reveals a deepening fracture in American AI governance. In the absence of comprehensive federal legislation, states have enacted divergent regulatory frameworks addressing algorithmic accountability, bias prevention, and fundamental rights protection. Simultaneously, the federal government has attempted to use executive orders with the aim of constraining state authority over AI governance. This federal-state conflict raises critical questions about the allocation of regulatory power in emerging technology domains and the capacity of fragmented governance structures to protect fundamental rights consistently across jurisdictions. The proposed presentation argues that this regulatory fragmentation reflects broader challenges facing public law in coordinating responses to transformative technologies that transcend traditional jurisdictional boundaries, with significant implications for how democratic societies balance innovation, security, and fundamental rights protection in an increasingly fractured governance landscape.
Digital governance has emerged as a contested domain of global regulation, often portrayed as a strategic battleground among the United States, China, and the European Union. Yet the metaphor of rivalry obscures a more complex dynamic in which competition, imitation, and regulatory diffusion coexist. This paper examines the evolving landscape of AI regulation through an interdisciplinary lens, combining legal analysis with insights from ethics, political science, and psychology. Focusing on the European Union, Brazil, and Japan, it explores how distinct normative commitments, institutional structures, and societal attitudes shape emerging AI governance models.
The EU’s 2024 AI Act, the first comprehensive AI statute worldwide, exemplifies a value‑based, product-oriented approach rooted in the Union’s legal path dependencies and internal institutional dynamics. Brazil’s AI Bill, currently under legislative review, reflects a hybrid trajectory: initially principle-based, later inspired by the EU model, and most recently reoriented toward sectoral enforcement and elements of self-regulation. Japan, by contrast, advances a government-led, soft law framework complemented by targeted sectoral regulation, emphasizing non-binding guidance. These approaches unfold against differing public attitudes toward AI and varying balances between legislative, executive, judicial, and private actors.
The paper argues that AI regulation constitutes a high-stakes arena in which jurisdictions simultaneously compete and converge in pursuit of an as-yet undefined global standard. Collaborative governance models – multidimensional in the EU, state-centered in Brazil, and nonformal and supportive in Japan – illustrate how legal frameworks are increasingly shaped by political, ethical, and psychological factors in defining the rules of the digital future.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming governance systems, increasing efficiency, innovation, and access to resources, while raising concerns about human rights protection due to increased digitisation. This paper analyses the multifaceted relationship between AI and human rights research in a digitally divided India, examining various ethical dimensions and legal lacunae arising from their convergence through doctrinal research methods, given the limitations of capturing the lived experiences of those suffering from digital exclusion.
Although AI has the potential to enhance access to justice and good governance, the infrastructural gaps, linguistic diversity, and low digital literacy levels in India hinder the ability of citizens to meaningfully exercise their rights, further exacerbating the gap between the haves and have-nots.
Thus, there is a need for a human rights-centric AI framework that targets digital inclusion, transparency, and accountability, facilitating AI’s role as a tool for legal empowerment rather than a mechanism that results in discrimination and exclusion, a possibility given the increasing digitisation.
Amid this background, the authors focus on the transformative potential of AI while acknowledging the limitations of increased digitisation, addressing the ethical and legal challenges to ensure a human rights-centric AI governance framework that aligns with India’s constitutional commitment to justice, equality, and digital inclusion in this digital age. Finally, the research makes recommendations on the need for independent AI oversight, algorithmic impact assessment, and ensuring the voices of marginalised communities are heard, to achieve the aim of digital inclusion.
Keywords: Digital Inequity, India, Artificial Intelligence, Human Rights, Inclusion.
This paper examines whether contemporary AI regulation is giving rise to a shared cross-jurisdictional standard for human oversight in high-stakes automated decision-making. Through a comparative analysis of the EU AI Act, recent U.S. executive and agency-level frameworks, and Asian developments such as South Korea’s 2024 AI Framework Act and Japan’s AI Promotion Act, I explore whether these systems reflect converging constitutional values or merely parallel policy instincts.
Across these jurisdictions, the paper identifies several emerging commonalities: (1) explicit rejection of fully automated decision-making in contexts affecting fundamental interests; (2) an insistence on “meaningful” rather than symbolic human involvement; (3) requirements for transparency, traceability, and explainability sufficient to enable genuine oversight; and (4) growing awareness of automation bias and the cognitive limits of human supervisors. These features suggest that human oversight is becoming a structurally necessary safeguard in democratic and technologically advanced regulatory regimes.
However, closer analysis reveals that this alignment is not yet a constitutional convergence. The EU embeds human oversight within a rights-based, legally binding framework; the U.S. approach remains sectoral, fragmented, and largely administrative; and Asian models prioritize safety, societal trust, and human-centric design but rely heavily on soft-law guidance. Enforcement architectures also diverge sharply and still develop.
The paper concludes that what is emerging is not a global constitutional minimum, but a family of regionally grounded oversight models animated by shared concerns about human control. These patterns raise important questions about whether functional equivalence—not formal constitutionalism—may become the basis for future global AI governance.