Source: The New York Times
The EU's flagship AI Act, positioned as a global regulatory gold standard, is struggling to keep pace with deployment cycles that now move in months rather than years. The vacuum is being filled by tech companies and aggressive early adopters, not elected bodies. This is a structural mismatch: modern governance operates through consensus, adversarial review, and coordination across member states, while AI systems scale privately, rapidly, and iteratively. Regulators are perpetually responding to deployments already in the field. The result is a two-tier world: wealthy nations and tech giants move fast and absorb compliance costs, while smaller economies and startups face barriers that function as unintended protectionism.