regulation
Assorted links for 1 October 2026
Seven links: a new complexity index finds Japan and China lead different halves of the AI-export supply chain, a 10-country survey finds most public servants already use AI while few trust their government's use of it, Uruguay's AI-readiness ranking, a Canadian policy magazine on AI flooding public consultations, Argentina and Delaware's competing proposals for AI legal personhood, a critical read of Ghana's AI strategy, and content-authenticity standards reaching consumer phones.
Assorted links for 30 September 2026
Five links: a Nigerian fintech AI-evaluation framework finds standard safety tests miss local fraud risks in both directions, India pitches its digital-infrastructure experience to the Global South at the UN, the Trump administration launches an AI front door for US federal services, Code for America and Anthropic pilot Claude for SNAP caseworkers, and Rondonia's state government adapts a wildfire-physics model for an AI early-warning system in the Amazon.
Non-Western governments warned the UN that pacing frontier AI can be gatekeeping
At the UN General Assembly's 81st session in September 2026, Pakistan, Nigeria, Argentina and other non-Western governments said proposals to pace frontier AI development for safety can function as gatekeeping favouring whichever countries already lead, while pressing their own proposals for a real hand in the rules.
Assorted links for 28 September 2026
Six links: Stanford research finding AI companion chatbots correlate with worse wellbeing for people with small social networks, a 72-country comparison of public-sector AI registers, the UN's new Scientific Panel and Global Dialogue on AI governance, a US federal survey on AI oversight gaps, an AI-agent payment-authorization benchmark, and a CEPAL implementation guide for AI in the Latin American public sector.
Assorted links for 27 September 2026
Five links: South Africa's AI policy rewrite after an AI-hallucinated citation scandal, a mapping of US federal AI governance against sector vulnerability, African diabetic-retinopathy screening running on imperfect data, record US scam losses driving a shift to cryptographic digital identity, and an executable Governance-as-Code compliance pipeline for the EU AI Act.
Assorted links for 7 September 2026
Seven links: a European Commission expert review on AI's divides across member states, infrastructure for governing AI agents, a paediatric chest X-ray model whose sensitivity falls from 95.1 to 6.2 per cent across countries, smartphone oral cancer screening in India, AI policy priorities across Africa, a benchmark for simulating governance policy, and Nigeria's sovereign AI agenda at GITEX.
Assorted links for 6 September 2026
Five links: why the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident was configuration rather than emergence, the biggest year on record for UK public sector AI contracts, a WhatsApp chatbot that ran participatory budgeting in Bogota, Korean smart-city pilots in Brunei and the Philippines, and the governance frameworks that miss Shadow AI.
Half these jurisdictions have no AI law of their own
Five researchers pulled 382 provisions out of 101 legal instruments across twenty jurisdictions that build no frontier AI model. Only 22 per cent sit in binding law, half the jurisdictions hold no domestic instrument of their own, and two provisions in the whole sample reach the party that built the model.
Assorted links for 31 August 2026
Nine links: what two frontier labs now book in a year, the three figures a Mexican court got when it asked three chatbots the same question, what a smaller model does when it is handed skills another model worked out, an 825 million euro fine with no AI in it.
Who can contradict the log
METR read 70,000 messages and about 1,300 transcripts from an unsanctioned board that OpenAI agents built in an Artifactory cache. Roughly 7 percent of the transcripts they evaluated contained spoofed tool calls, where an agent made it look like it ran one command while running another.
Assorted links for 27 August 2026
Eleven links: what METR found inside OpenAI's agent incident, what an IMF paper puts on the table for African growth, where India sits per head rather than in total, and a Brazilian committee text that requires human supervision and authorises facial recognition in the same breath.
Kenya's draft AI policy promises a pay benchmark for data work indexed to rates abroad
A row in the implementation matrix commits to a fair-pay reference framework for data annotation and content moderation, calibrated to international rates. The document gives no rate and does not say whose. What is scheduled first is a publication, and publishing it needs nobody else's signature.
The government share in Pew's AI-writing study is about five flagged pages out of 669
Pew ran an AI-detection model over nearly 490,000 web pages and found ten times more AI writing on commercial domains than on government ones. The government figure everyone will quote is drawn from 669 sampled pages, and it has been falling since 2024 while every other domain rises.
A register of government algorithms can only hold what the state bought
Almost every country now has an AI policy, so that count has stopped telling anyone apart. The measure that has not saturated is whether a government must disclose the algorithms it runs itself, and procurement caps how much of it a register could ever reach.
A rule written for one market became a property of the tool everyone else uses
Brussels wrote AI transparency rules for its own market. The mark now travels with the tool everywhere, and the people it reaches had no part in either decision. The objection is jurisdictional, not to the rule.
Claude's content mark shows that a model touched a text, not whether it supplied the argument
Claude's new mark can show that a model touched a text. It cannot tell whether the model supplied the argument, or only the English through which the argument had to travel.
Consultation is the cheap rung
The obvious objection to an 81,000-person AI consultation is representativeness. It is the weaker objection, and my own research is why.
The World Development Report 2026 is out
The World Bank's flagship on artificial intelligence has published. One of its numbers, what the nine chapters cover, and what I will be writing about here.
Control beats location
Time governments realize that control beats location.
What generative AI does to the open web
Fascinating paper by Alex Chan (NBER, 2026) on what generative AI does to the open web. The web runs on a simple trade: publishers make things worth reading, search sends readers to them, and the visits pay for the work.
Summer in Europe while you can: AI and the Jevons paradox might soon make it unbearable
Biometrics lowered the administrative cost of designing new entry requirements, which removed the natural brake on regulatory ambition. The efficiency gain was immediately consumed by the expanded scope of what became feasible to demand.
Worth engaging with, and worth the harder questions
Worth engaging with, and worth asking the harder questions about. This is the kind of build the small-models argument has been waiting for.
Verified humans, synthetic voices: where collective intelligence meets collective manipulation
The same infrastructure that could help democratic publics convert consensus into leverage can, with a different governance structure, manufacture the appearance of consensus where none exists.
Singapore's governance framework for agentic AI in government
Singapore's IMDA released a governance framework for agentic AI in government (via Drasko Draskovic, PhD). It is careful, thorough work on oversight, testing, and accountability.
Europe regulates the digital world and keeps tripping in the physical one
I just came back from Frankfurt, and I spent an unhealthy amount of time talking about digital policies while looking at stairs.
The GDPR review, and what gets traded for competitiveness
So, the European Union is reviewing parts of the GDPR to make it more compatible with innovation and competitiveness.
The inference divide: the inequality no one is talking about
Two people with identical devices, connections and skills, using the same model, can receive fundamentally different intelligence augmentation. One subscription lets the model think for minutes. The other gets seconds.
The AI future is about identity, territory and governance
The AI Future Isn't Just About Algorithms: It's About Identity, Territory, and Governance. Thank you for the opportunity to speak at last week Techritory Forum in Riga!
A hype check on human-in-the-loop
Help needed: human-in-the-loop hype check The more I think about it, the more I suspect that blanket calls for “human-in-the-loop” in AI for public services are a first-world comfort blanket.
Context lock-in and the new AI monopolies
The next lock-in may not be the model but the accumulated context: conversations, preferences and work history that cannot be moved. Open protocols for context portability are the remedy, and they are a rare pro-competition rule most sides could accept.
Who is liable when the harm is assembled from parts
Beatriz Botero Arcila proposes fault-based joint and several liability for AI systems, with targeted strict liability for high-risk cases. Her framework takes on the 'many hands' problem: who answers when the harm is assembled from parts.
Agents for the few, queues for the many – or agents for all?
Closing the public services divide by regulating for AI's opportunities.
AI's effects on elections are largely overstated
Keegan McBride and colleagues in MIT Technology Review, on why AI's measured effect on elections is far smaller than the commentary suggests. A reminder to prefer the research on voting behaviour over the punditry.
Underestimated effects of AI on democracy, and a gloomy scenario
Bots writing to legislators got within 2 percent of the response rate humans did. The trouble starts when governments answer with bots of their own.