World map circuit board digitally created photo

Binary framing gets complicated (Jorg Greuel/Getty Images)

The quiet regionalisation of AI governance

Superpower rivalry has stalled global AI rules, but regional blocs like ASEAN are moving fast enough to make rules stick.

Sameera Pillai

3 September 20264 min read

Governments are moving to regulate AI at wildly different speeds. Australia’s recent Office of AI (Opens in new window) is an example. But countries acting alone risks creating rules that don’t line up across borders.

AI regulation is also becoming a geopolitical signal. The global division into two AI governance camps (Opens in new window) sees the US pursue (Opens in new window) a security-focused approach, with “trusted networks” of allies, while China promotes state-directed multilateralism through frameworks like the World AI Cooperation Organisation (Opens in new window).

This binary framing gets more complicated once you factor in a recent essay (Opens in new window) by Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, where he rightly points to the gap between AI’s development and pace of change, and the existing policy landscape to address the risks associated with it.

Amodei calls for a global coalition of democracies to lead AI development around shared values, including locking down supply chains critical to AI among allies only. It echoes the US-led Pax Silica (Opens in new window) initiative. However, while the logic behind Amodei’s democracy-aligned AI partnership is strong, it leaves open questions around scope - what “democracies” look like today, where to draw the line, and whether countries such as Türkiye and India be in or out.

Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Anthropic (World Economic Forum/Flickr)

Regional coalitions are emerging as a more realistic path towards AI governance. Bodies like ASEAN (Opens in new window) and the Pacific Islands Forum (Opens in new window) are already building momentum towards AI rules and regulations, so they can move faster than a coalition built from scratch. Global multilateral processes including the AI Safety Summits (Opens in new window) have produced valuable but non-binding communiqués (Opens in new window), while the EU AI Act (Opens in new window) became the world’s first comprehensive, binding AI law within a few years. This shows that fewer, more aligned members can legislate and enforce faster than global consensus allows.

One area where regional coalitions have the clearest edge is trade. In the Indo-Pacific, where trade partnerships are paramount, tying AI governance to trade agreements gives regional partners a strong incentive to comply. Regulation becomes binding by being made conditional on trade access, rather than left to voluntary alignment. For example, the Singapore-Australia Digital Economy Agreement, (Opens in new window) built on the existing free trade framework between the countries, already treats AI as an area of formal cooperation alongside binding provisions on data flows. Extending that same binding structure to AI governance, rather than leaving it as voluntary, offers a template that regional coalitions could replicate in broader frameworks, including the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

As AI tools grow more sophisticated by the day, some form of binding governance is better than none at all.

AI risks are not uniform but vary sharply by region. Global frameworks are often too broad to meaningfully address specific risks. Regional governance allows blocs to target the issues that are most acute in their own context. Southeast Asia, for example, is facing a crisis of electoral integrity as AI-driven deepfakes (Opens in new window) influence elections. As previously discussed in The Interpreter (Opens in new window), Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines each banned Grok over its use in generating deepfakes. ASEAN is now converting that momentum into something more binding in the form of its Digital Economy Framework Agreement (Opens in new window), a treaty-level agreement (Opens in new window) that will embed AI governance provisions.

Regional bodies are far from immune to the power politics that besiege global organisations. A dominant economy may hold outsized influence over which standards are set. But the anticipated dysfunction at the regional level can be contained more than at a global level, while even flawed regional governance models move faster than finding multilateral consensus. As AI tools grow more sophisticated by the day, some form of binding governance is better than none at all.

That speed of action still comes with a fragmentation risk. Different standards across different blocs could create compliance hurdles for AI developers operating across borders. For this reason, cross-regional harmonisation is necessary. This could take the form of shared technical benchmarks, building on existing principles like the OECD AI principles, (Opens in new window) or interoperable standards, which already have strong precedent in the defence and security domain (Opens in new window). With AI becoming a national security issue (Opens in new window), this precedent is worth borrowing from.

Regional coalitions will not dissolve the binary race to govern AI between the US and China, but they offer a more realistic third path, allowing countries to shape AI governance standards without having to fully align with either superpower, and giving them agency on an issue that will define the next few years.

Amodei himself compares (Opens in new window) AI’s geopolitical impact to nuclear weapons. However, there is a crucial difference. With nuclear weapons, much of the world’s arms control governance architecture was built in the aftermath of the Second World War. With AI, the window to get governance right is still open, and regional coalitions may be the fastest way to do it.

About the author

Sameera Pillai

Sameera Pillai is a Policy and Research Officer based in Canberra, focusing on economic security, energy trade and critical minerals.

Topics

Artificial intelligence ASEAN Trade & investment Southeast Asia