Title: The International and Geopolitical Context of AI Regulation

Abstract: Contemporary regulation of digital technologies by nation-states unfolds under a darkening shadow of geopolitical competition. The United States government operates simultaneously in a domestic political environment dominated by oligopolistic firms competing to expand, and in an international political environment wherein it competes with other sovereign nations by cultivating and deploying digital technological capacities for geostrategic ends. Thanks to the ensuing cross-cutting pressures, national and supranational regulation can take on surprisingly reticulated, even baroque or perverse, forms.

Three recent monographs offer illuminating and complementary maps of these geopolitical conflicts and the national responses to digital technologies upon which they rest. One proposes an ambitious, synoptic account of how geopolitical dynamics unfold: This is, impressively, the only genuinely all-embracing account of the field on offer at the moment. The other two books develop more narrowly drawn arguments focused on specific regulatory dynamics. These are useful, but more limited in scope. Folding together insights from all three books, however, opens up a pathway toward a new, more perspicacious understanding of geopolitical dynamics, and hence the most likely future of digital regulation. My analysis suggests grounds for skepticism about the emergence of a deep regulatory equilibrium centered on European norms. While regulatory regimes may converge on common solutions, the convergence reflects no European hegemony. And the area of overlap will be strictly limited by growing bipolar geostrategic conflict between the United States and China. 

Bio: Aziz Huq is the Frank and Bernice J. Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and associate professor in the sociology department. His books include How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (2018) (with Tom Ginsburg), The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (2021), and The Rule of Law: A Very Short Introduction (2024). His work has also been published in the Harvard Law Review, Daedalus, and many other scholarly venues. Before teaching, he represented civil liberties claimants with the Brennan Center for Justice, and worked for the International Crisis Group in Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. He was also a law clerk first for Judge Robert D. Sack of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States.