Source: Quartz
The basic infrastructure for coordinating AI policy across jurisdictions—multilateral agreements, enforcement mechanisms, technical standards bodies with teeth—doesn't exist yet, and the speed of capability deployment is outpacing any realistic timeline for building it. Instead, a fractured patchwork is emerging: the EU moves toward restrictive frameworks, the US pursues light-touch sector-specific rules, China prioritizes domestic control, and companies optimize for whichever jurisdiction offers the least friction. This creates effective regulatory arbitrage. Decisions about how AI systems behave in critical domains—hiring, lending, content moderation, autonomous systems—are being made by product teams and business units rather than through any legitimate democratic process. The problem is acute because the technical choices baked into these systems early on become nearly irreversible infrastructure.