The Birth of the AI Regime Complex

The promises and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have recently led to an intense race to regulate the technology. However, no central, regulatory institution has emerged. Rather, the current regulatory landscape is characterized by a variety of nascent and partially overlapping governance arrangements, resembling an emerging AI regime complex. The purpose of this paper is to provide a first conceptualization and mapping of the birth of the AI regime complex. To this end, we conceptualize a regime complex as defined by four key dimensions – scale, diversity, density, and hierarchy – and then map the emerging complex of AI governance using a novel dataset. Our contribution is twofold. Theoretically, we offer explanations about the “birth” of regime complexes, as well as the characteristics and evolutionary factors that shape the development of novel policy issues in a densely institutionalized space. Empirically, we use new data to systematically map international AI institutions, which allows us to track the temporal evolution of the AI regime complex between 2015 and 2024. Our paper contributes to the literatures on regime complexity, as well as a burgeoning literature on the global governance of AI.