Global AI rules don't really work; countries only pass tough laws based on their own internal history, not global peer pressure.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
<p>AI Policymaking Across the Globe: A Large-N Analysis of More Than 8,000 Policy Documents from 76 Countries</p>
SSRN · 6312103
The Takeaway
A massive analysis of 8,000 documents found that binding AI laws are not driven by international trends or peer-country influence. Instead, they are the result of a slow, domestic 'law hardening' process where a country piles up strategy memos until they eventually turn into binding legislation, debunking the idea of global regulatory diffusion.
From the abstract
Legislative activity on AI governance has surged globally, yet we lack comparative empirical evidence on how "law hardening" develops and which pre-legislative activities catalyse binding regulation. We analyse the AI policy formation pipeline using more than 8,000 policy documents from 76 countries. Using Cox survival models, event studies, and Granger-style tests, we examine whether binding AI laws are driven by domestic pre-legislative activity or cross-border diffusion. We find that domestic