Global Landscape

How China, the UN, the OECD, and the rest of the world govern AI

• Global Soft Law: OECD, UNESCO, and the G7 Hiroshima Process — The machinery behind the world’s non-binding AI rulebook: how the OECD built the evidence hub, how UNESCO turned ethics into assessment tools that governments actually run, how the G7 answered ChatGPT in months — and how soft law quietly writes tomorrow’s statutes. (5 lessons, 45 min)
• The United Nations and the Treaty Track: Global Digital Compact and the CoE Convention — How AI governance reached the UN General Assembly — dueling consensus resolutions, the Global Digital Compact, an IPCC-style Scientific Panel co-chaired by Yoshua Bengio and Maria Ressa — and how the Council of Europe wrote the first binding AI treaty, plus the ratification mechanics that decide when a treaty actually bites. (4 lessons, 50 min)
• China: The World’s Most Developed Binding AI Rulebook — How China built the world’s densest stack of binding AI rules — algorithm filing, deepfake consent, generative-AI licensing-in-all-but-name, and mandatory content labeling — and what its vertical, iterative playbook means next to the EU’s horizontal one. (5 lessons, 55 min)
• Asia-Pacific: Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India, and Australia — Five democracies, five different answers: Korea’s AI Basic Act — the world’s second horizontal AI statute — beside Japan’s no-penalty promotion law, Singapore’s testing toolkit, India’s labeling rules, and Australia’s bet on existing law. (5 lessons, 55 min)
• The UK, Canada, Brazil — and the Missing Map: Africa, the Middle East, Latin America — Three democracies that promised AI laws and stalled — the UK’s regulator-led experiment, Canada’s dead bill, Brazil’s bicameral grind — then the map most curricula skip: the African Union’s continental strategy, Gulf-state ambition, Latin America beyond Brazil, and the data workers who make frontier AI possible. (5 lessons, 60 min)
• Summits, Safety Institutes, and Comparing Regimes Like a Pro — The analytic capstone of the global domain: the summit series from Bletchley to Delhi and what its renames reveal, the safety-institute network and its politics, the four axes that let you compare any two regimes in ninety seconds, and the multinational compliance playbook that turns comparison into strategy. (5 lessons, 55 min)