In countries around the world, the public sector must ensure the trustworthiness of any algorithmic tools it wants to deploy by verifying that they function as intended, ensuring fair and acceptable use, and guaranteeing explainability of outputs.
Still, numerous high-profile incidents have emerged in which failing to consider one or more of these factors has led to undesirable events or outcomes in areas such as educational qualifications, social security, and debt. The truth is that the widespread use of AI is still new and much remains to be done to standardise approaches to safe deployment.
Nobody notices infrastructure until it fails
This is a common saying in the public sector. To this end, much of the important work in AI governance is routine day-to-day processes, guidance documentation, and activities within organisations that lead to the safety and responsible use critical for trustworthy AI.
The Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard (ATRS) fits this description. It is a UK government initiative that establishes a standardised way for public sector organisations to publish information about how and why they use algorithmic tools.
In 2024, GPAI ran a project on Algorithmic transparency in the public sector, led by Juan David Gutierrez from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and supported by CEIMIA (Centre d’Expertise International de Montréal en Intelligence Artificielle) – one of the three Centres of the GPAI Expert Community. The study reviewed global best practices and featured three case studies from Chile, the European Union and the UK. At its core, it explored why countries pursue such initiatives and how championing transparency can help avoid controversies and improve public trust. Before diving into the details of the standard, it is worth looking at a few cases that illustrate why such a standard is necessary.
Figure showing the reason why democracies might adopt algorithmic transparency initiatives, taken from the GPAI 2024 Algorithmic Transparency report
A ‘mutant algorithm’, or just opaque?
In the UK, one of the most high-profile controversies occurred in 2020, involving a school exam grading algorithm that estimated grades for students who did not sit formal exams due to COVID. The algorithm was subsequently found to unfairly benefit private school students while limiting test scores from publicly funded schools. There are also several examples of opaque uses of algorithms within benefits systems. Australia’s ‘Robodebt’ scheme assessment programme fell under scrutiny for generating false debts, resulting in significant impacts on affected individuals. In Denmark, algorithms used by the country’s welfare agency have been the subject of reports of potential mass surveillance, discrimination and social scoring.
Beyond governments, equally high-profile cases have involved algorithms used in hiring systems or credit scoring that discriminated against people based on their gender, race or ethnicity.
Many of these controversies were exacerbated by the opacity of the algorithms used: certain impacts could have been reduced by proactively sharing information about tools and by working with the public and civil society during testing, development and implementation to identify risks ahead of deployment. The tools’ developers would have had the opportunity to engage with comprehensive information in the public domain, rather than relying on incorrect or incomplete information. This is all essential to ensure our emerging ‘algorithmic infrastructure’ stays ‘routine’, behind the scenes, and working as intended.
To address this, the UK government published the ATRS in November 2021. In a nutshell, ATRS provides a structured template and public repository to improve transparency, accountability and public trust by documenting how algorithmic tools work, their purpose, and their impact on decisions that affect citizens. In 2025, reporting the use of algorithms via the ATRS became mandatory for central government departments and Arms-Length Bodies (a specific classification of public bodies in the UK).
To build on the momentum, the government committed to the Roadmap for Modern Digital Government to compile and publish records of all identified in-scope algorithmic tools (as of March 2025) in government departments (excluding their associated public bodies) by the end of 2025. This was achieved, and at the time of writing, 125 ATRS records have been published, with more in progress.
International engagement and CEIMIA initiatives to improve ATRS
The Standard received international attention, with the OECD identifying it as a world-leading initiative and featuring it on the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation. In Europe, the Estonian government translated the Standard and piloted it as part of the UK-Estonia Tech Partnership, providing insights into how the Standard can be implemented across different jurisdictions.
Following the 2024 GPAI project on algorithmic transparency, the UK government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) entered into a partnership with CEIMIA under the brand of the Centres of the GPAI Expert Community to review the existing UK transparency standard and obtain rapid feedback as the standard continues to develop. ATRS also benefits from input from a group of international experts, many of whom participated in the initial 2024 GPAI project. The results informed a set of recommendations, which the UK government is currently considering for a future update.
Testing the Standard through international partnerships, such as the one with Estonia and the Centres of the GPAI Expert Community, is a way for the UK to share best practices, a cornerstone of driving responsible data and AI practices globally.
Transparency and security must work together
Responsibility in a public technology context is often about striking a balance, which can require difficult trade-offs. Transparency matters, but so does security, especially in today’s geopolitically unstable environment.
How algorithms interact with and shape public life remains a major focus worldwide. One of the key themes at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 was Safe and Trusted AI, under which transparency was a specific concern, and the G7 could discuss it as a critical issue.
Transparency is essential for governments adopting algorithmic tools to enhance productivity and growth. Ensuring that it is a priority for public-sector organisations is an ongoing learning process. As the ATRS Standard gains wider recognition and adoption in the UK and beyond, DSIT continues to explore ways to improve it. Part of this involves researching how public-sector teams interact with the ATRS process and balancing security and safety considerations, including those related to cyber threats.
In the end, all of this helps DSIT to create a healthy balance between maximising transparency – protecting citizens – and ensuring that digital government services remain safe and secure.
As our daily activities become more digitised, from ordering dinner to receiving medical care, the amount of data produced by humans and machines continues to grow each year. The internet provides a seemingly limitless flow of accessible data of all formats and natures, from news sites to social media. In early 2026, the internet archive initiative CommonCrawl boasted over 300 billion webpages in its database. Adding to this digital abundance, even larger volumes of data remain underused and locked in organisations’ private databases. Meanwhile, IBM reports that in 2024, the biggest challenge for AI developers was a shortage of high-quality data. This is the AI data paradox: despite an abundance of data globally, AI developers face a scarcity of usable data, with growing expert concerns about a looming data crunch as reported by the OECD (2025).
Scraped internet data as a key source for AI training
Data is the cornerstone of modern AI development, from model training to grounding. As online public content continues to grow, it has become a major source of training data for AI models. Initiatives such as CommonCrawl and LAION have harvested, or “scraped”, billions of online pages and images, ranging from news articles and government websites to blogs and social media. These datasets fuel rapid advances in AI tools, but also pose deep challenges.
Figure 1: The AI data value chain: From scraping data for reuse to content to generation
Contemporary AI requires contemporary data sourcing methods
As investment and revenue flow, AI has become a major industry, but data-sourcing methods have not kept pace. Many current AI processes still rely heavily on scraping large amounts of public content, often without permission, proper compensation or quality controls. But this “grab what you can” approach has limits. As the report documents, over 50 copyright and data protection lawsuits have been filed worldwide, while websites are increasingly deploying technical and contractual barriers to prevent scraping. At the same time, the web is increasingly saturated with low-quality material, including AI-generated “slop” and disinformation. Meanwhile, vast amounts of valuable data remain locked away on private servers because concerns about legal risk and confidentiality inhibit sharing.
These quality challenges and legal pressures point to the need for a new approach, one that moves beyond extraction towards mutually beneficial data-sharing arrangements, including commercial and non-commercial agreements as described in the OECD’s Mapping Relevant Data Collection Mechanisms for AI Training report (2025). Instead of relying on a single technical solution, the VIADUCT report presents data sourcing as a systemic challenge at the intersection of law, economics and technology. While data infrastructures have expanded significantly, experience shows that technical capacity alone does not initiate data flows.
Data sharing as a transaction
If not a simple engineering problem, then what is data sharing? At its most basic, data sharing is a transaction between two parties.
For common assets such as treasury bonds, Brent crude oil or soda cans, industry standards, regulations and institutions support transactions and build market trust. By contrast, data is not a standard asset. It is a collection of diverse assets that take different forms, with varying stakeholders and regulatory requirements. Consider two datasets: one with hospital patients’ X-rays, and another with archived news articles. The first dataset contains sensitive personal information protected under the GDPR in Europe and must comply with the principles of confidentiality and consent. News articles in the second dataset are copyrighted works whose owners can prohibit reproduction and opt out of AI training under EU law. These simple examples show that sharing data cannot rely on technology alone but must also consider a dataset’s economic, legal and social contexts and constraints.
Data is not monolithic
Government officials and business leaders often use metaphors like “raw material”, “new oil” and “gold” to describe data. However, contrary to what these metaphors suggest, data is not a uniform resource. In its EASD in the age of AI (2025), the OECD describes data as “recorded information in structured or unstructured formats, including texts, images, sound, and video”, which may also include AI models themselves when training data is memorised. On top of its diversity of shapes and formats, data is also a mosaic of digital assets, each governed by different rules, logic and constraints. Is one dealing with a copyrighted news article? Personal health records? A company’s trade secrets? Government statistics? Open source software code? Understanding this is essential to designing sustainable AI data ecosystems. Each type of data has its own legal guardrails, economic dynamics and technical challenges.
The VIADUCT report classifies data into five governance regimes according to the EU legal framework:
Figure 2: Data governance regimes under EU law
Governance model
Data scope
Dataset example
Copyrighted content
All creative works, including texts, images, videos, sounds, software source code and certain databases. Authors have exclusive rights to reproduce, communicate and distribute their works. They can also opt-out of commercial AI processing.
News article dataset, book archive, social media posts, music database
Personal data
Any data or information relating to an identified or identifiable individual (“data subject”). Under EU’s GDPR, a data processing, such as AI training, must be transparent, confidential, minimal and motivated by legal grounds such as data subject consent, or controller’s legitimate interest.
Customer history database, patients’ medical records, mobile phone GPS locations
Trade secrets
A dataset which is secret, is safeguarded and holds value due to its secrecy. Companies are protected against unlawful access, and can share trade secrets with third parties under strict safeguarding measures.
Engineering blueprint files, pharmaceutical molecule database, commercial lead database
Public sector data
Under EU law, public sector bodies must publish their documents for commercial and non-commercial reuse, free from exclusive license and without fee beyond cost compensation.
Texts of law, national statistics, national company registry
Open data
Any data which can be accessed, shared and used by anyone for any purpose, free of charge. In Europe, this may include contents with expired copyrights, government documents, and open-license content
19th century books, Wikipedia articles, open-source software code
Three guiding principles for sustainable and responsible approaches to data sharing for AI
In this diverse and complex environment, the report sets out three clear guiding principles that apply to all data types and governance regimes to foster sustainable and ethical data sharing for AI.
Legal compliance is the first principle. Data sharing and downstream use must respect applicable legal frameworks. In Europe, this includes honouring copyright holders’ rights, establishing legal grounds for the use of personal data and protecting confidential trade secrets.
The second is trust. Data holders need assurance that their data will be used only for permitted or legitimate purposes and protected by robust cybersecurity measures. Data consumers, in turn, need confidence that datasets are legitimate, accurate and of high quality.
The third principle is fairness. Data-sharing arrangements should be mutually beneficial, crediting organisations that support AI development and, where appropriate, sharing the benefits.
Figure 3: Ethical data sharing principles and best practices
Constraints for ethical data sharing
These principles sound simple, but applying them in practice is challenging. Exchanging large volumes of data requires expertise, which is often lacking in smaller organisations, and the process is fraught with technical, legal, and economic frictions. Data quality issues are a major source of friction, as errors, inappropriate content or bias can create risks and costs for downstream AI use. Ensuring data holders maintain control of their data after sharing or publishing is essential. This is referred to as digital self-determination. This is the case for personal data, copyrighted content or trade secrets, for which the data holder must often grant permission for each new processing act. EU law imposes strict confidentiality standards for personal data, trade secrets and sensitive government data. Finally, to incentivise data sharing and ensure its sustainability for data holders, implementing appropriate economic models such as cost and value compensation appears to be an essential solution.
Figure 4: Ethical data sharing constraints
Transitioning to a multidisciplinary and implementation-focused approach
This non-exhaustive list of challenges illustrates the limits of relying only on normative or technical responses to address data-sharing constraints. The report investigates alternative approaches, such as opt-out methods, smart contracts, data attribution and privacy-enhancing technologies.
When it comes to ethical data sharing, moving from Is it possible? to How can we implement it? requires developing actionable tools and recommendations to address challenges. Given their diverse and context-sensitive nature, VIADUCT facilitates dialogue among data holders, AI developers, policymakers and researchers on concrete data-sharing projects and experiments. Ultimately, this exercise seeks to create a better understanding of the challenges for data sharing and promote and test innovative solutions at the crossroads of technology, economics and law.
Participatory AI initiatives are meant to bring together diverse stakeholders to design and oversee AI systems that are fair and trustworthy. However, a recent review of 80 participatory AI initiatives revealed that, rather than providing participants with genuine decision-making power, the vast majority consult specific communities on narrow implementation details.
Meanwhile, every major AI lab now conducts some form of public consultation, the EU AI Act requires stakeholder involvement, and the OECD AI Principles regard stakeholder engagement as a fundamental element of trustworthy AI. Participation in AI governance has become more popular than ever. But an uncomfortable pattern is emerging: the more we discuss participation, the less we discuss meaningful engagement, real influence and power.
Many participatory approaches primarily involve communities during the early stages of the AI system lifecycle: design, data collection, and model development, while later stages, such as deployment, monitoring and system evolution, attract far less attention. During my fieldwork across Kenya, Malawi, and the Philippines, a troubling question keeps surfacing: once the participatory design phase concludes, who truly governs the AI system? Even highly participatory processes often dissolve once the system is launched. Governance then shifts back to those who built or commissioned the system. Communities involved in shaping the design often have little influence over how systems evolve to meet ongoing community needs or how they expand beyond their initial scope.
The old lesson we keep relearning
Back in 1969, urban planner Sherry Arnstein published a deceptively simple insight: not all participation redistributes power. Her “ladder of citizen participation” described eight levels, from manipulation at the bottom to citizen control at the top. She called the middle rungs “tokenism”: processes that perform inclusion without actually transferring authority. Arnstein was writing about urban planning in American cities, but her framework resonates powerfully in today’s AI landscape.
Over fifty years later, AI researchers are revisiting this lesson. Recent studies have introduced the concept of “participation washing”: the act of claiming inclusion without the necessary redistribution of power. Other researchers have documented how participatory rhetoric often conceals the ongoing centralisation of decision-making authority.
These findings paint a consistent picture. Participatory AI, despite methodological progress, largely remains at Arnstein’s “consultation” and “informing” levels rather than reaching the “partnership” or “delegated power” levels. The reasons for this are understandable. Genuine participation is costly, slow, and fosters accountability relationships that complicate rapid development and deployment cycles. Organisations optimising for scale naturally minimise governance complexity. However, this means participatory AI often reproduces the very power imbalances it seeks to address.
Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation
The real divide: Methods versus infrastructure
Despite all this, the field has made genuine progress in developing methods to meaningfully involve people in AI design. The repository of tools and metrics on the OECD.AI Policy Observatory showcases participatory frameworks that now guide humanitarian and public sector AI initiatives globally. Methods have become increasingly sophisticated, moving beyond superficial consultation towards authentic co-design. What remains underdeveloped is the infrastructure for ongoing governance after deployment.
Think of it this way. Methods answer: “How do we involve people in design?” Infrastructure addresses: “How do people exercise authority after deployment?”
This distinction matters because AI systems, as the OECD definition emphasises, are adaptive. They are never “finished.” They evolve continuously through new training data, model updates, and deployment expansions. Each evolution requires governance decisions.
AI also relies on collective data. These are not tools that individuals choose to use; rather, they are infrastructure that processes communal information and makes decisions that affect entire populations. Without proper governance, participation during the design phase can inadvertently legitimise systems that centralise power. “We consulted the community” becomes a justification for deployment, even if communities no longer hold any authority over the system’s future.
What commons governance looks like in practice
If the challenge is institutional, what institutional forms could address it? One promising approach draws on principles from natural resource commons. Economist Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that communities can effectively manage shared resources such as fisheries, forests and irrigation systems. The application of commons governance to knowledge and digital resources has been extensively developed in later work, from Hess and Ostrom’s study of knowledge commons to comprehensive frameworks for analysing knowledge commons governance across various institutional contexts.
Commons governance models have several features that matter for AI: collective ownership, where communities hold rights to the resource; participatory decision making, where rules for usage and development are established through community processes; value sharing, where benefits are returned to the community; and continuous stewardship, where governance continues as long as the system operates.
The work I contribute to involves exploring whether these principles can guide AI system development in resource-limited settings. In Malawi, our research team at NYU and our local partners are creating a voice-based crisis reporting system designed to ensure that community governance councils oversee data practices, model updates, and deployment decisions. In the Philippines, we are collaborating with Kalinga State University on an Indigenous Knowledge Data Collaborative that allows communities to control how their traditional knowledge is digitised and used. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, emphasising Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics, offer a powerful framework here. These principles emerged from broader movements around Indigenous data sovereignty and represent a significant way to reshape data governance around community authority rather than external oversight.
While the OECD AI Principles mention data trusts as a mechanism for ethical data sharing, commons models take this logic further. Data trusts typically delegate authority to trustees acting on a community’s behalf. Commons models place community decision-making at the centre. The community does not transfer control to a benevolent intermediary; it retains authority itself.
Initiatives like Mozilla Common Voice and various Indigenous data-sovereignty movements are exploring this path worldwide, yet critical questions persist. Can commons governance operate effectively in resource-limited humanitarian settings? What occurs when commons governance moves too slowly for operational needs? Our fieldwork aims to address these exact questions.
What we are learning and what presents challenges
I want to be frank about the limitations of this work. These are early-stage experiments, not established models. However, they reveal important tensions that the wider field needs to address. If participatory AI governance is to go beyond words, we must be honest about what makes it challenging.
Power redistribution is costly. Governance meetings involve travel expenses, translation services, and participant compensation. In our work in Malawi, these costs are significant and surpass typical AI development budgets. However, this should be viewed not just as an expense but as an investment in risk mitigation. Without this investment, systems in complex environments risk rejection, non-adoption and even obsolescence.
Democracy is slow, and crises are urgent. Emergency responses demand quick decisions. Community governance takes time. The challenge is to differentiate between decisions that truly require rapid centralised action and those that only seem urgent to technical implementers.
“Community” is not uniform. Gender, age, and ethnicity influence who takes part and whose voice carries weight, and commons governance does not automatically resolve representation issues. However, it does make them visible and demands specific mechanisms to address them.
Sustainability remains uncertain because meaningful participation requires ongoing resources; governance cannot be an afterthought funded by short-term grants. It must be incorporated into budgets from the outset and treated as operational expenditure. International development finance models will need to adapt to support this. A system that works brilliantly for two years and then collapses because governance funding runs out is not a success.
What this means for AI policy
These experiments demonstrate methods to strengthen international frameworks for stakeholder engagement.
First, we need clearer distinctions between engagement levels. Consultative engagement involves gathering input to inform others’ decisions. Governance authority means stakeholders exercise binding power over system operation. Frameworks often conflate these two very different concepts. When a government or company says it has “engaged stakeholders,” does that mean it sought feedback or that it shared power? Making this distinction explicit helps implementers understand what they are truly committing to, and helps communities know what to expect.
Second, resource models need to change. Governance infrastructure, including ongoing meetings, capacity building, and conflict resolution, should be seen as a way to protect assets rather than as overhead. Current assessments of AI pilots rarely differentiate between technical and governance factors when a project fails. This complicates the process of allocating resources effectively. Funding structures must recognise that governance is the mechanism that maintains an AI system’s viability and trust over time.
Third, we need governance metrics. The OECD effectively monitors AI policy implementation. But we also need ways to measure the quality of power distribution. Who makes binding decisions about how a system evolves? Just as “technical debt” builds up when code is rushed, “governance debt” accumulates when engagement is overlooked. Eventually, the interest is paid in the form of lost trust or system failure. Recent work on AI accountability frameworks suggests promising directions for creating such assessments.
Finally, community data ownership has an unclear legal status in most jurisdictions. Cross-jurisdictional research on legal frameworks that support collective governance would be very valuable. Experiments such as New Zealand’s Māori data sovereignty frameworks and Barcelona’s data cooperatives offer promising models to learn from. The goal is not to impose universal frameworks but to document what works, what does not, and where the legal gaps are most severe.
Community governance authority as infrastructure
The participatory turn in AI governance represents genuine progress. However, involving people during design without engaging them in governance risks becoming a sophisticated form of consultation that maintains existing power structures. This is exactly what Arnstein warned against more than fifty years ago.
Moving from participation to power involves treating community governance authority as infrastructure: something that requires investment, upkeep, and institutional backing comparable to the technical systems it oversees. It means funding that supports governance alongside technical development. It means metrics that evaluate power distribution, not just engagement processes. And it means honest recognition that meaningful participation is slower and more costly than consultation, but also more likely to produce systems that communities genuinely trust and use over the long term.
Eighty participatory AI initiatives were reviewed, and most of them never moved beyond consultation. That finding should concern anyone who values participation. If we are serious about closing the gap between engagement and authority, we must start building the governance infrastructures to do it. AI remains in its early stages, and there is much we still need to understand. But one thing is becoming clear: if AI is considered infrastructure, it requires governance infrastructure. Otherwise, there is no trustworthy AI.
The international community has made significant progress in defining what responsible AI looks like. The next step is investing in the unglamorous, difficult, and necessary work of establishing governance structures to uphold these standards. This involves supporting communities not only as participants in design but also as equal partners in decision-making.
Among the various tools available to policymakers, regulatory sandboxes have gained considerable prominence in the AI governance landscape because they enable supervised innovation testing under controlled conditions and within limited timeframes. This can help to identify risks early, foster regulatory learning and refine regulatory requirements before they are applied at scale.
As AI regulatory sandboxes expand across jurisdictions and sectors, common design principles, recurring challenges and opportunities for greater effectiveness and policy coherence are emerging. As this happens, institutional co-operation and knowledge sharing are more important for ensuring coherent and effective regulatory experimentation both nationally and across borders.
In November 2025, the OECD webinar “AI Sandboxes: Sharing knowledge for success” brought together government officials, regulators and policy experts from seven countries to discuss the design and implementation of AI regulatory sandboxes. Here are the event’s key takeaways.
What is an ‘AI regulatory sandbox’?
Although there is no universally accepted definition, a regulatory sandbox generally offers temporary regulatory flexibility or waivers, allowing innovative products, services, or business models to be tested under controlled conditions and regulatory oversight. This approach promotes responsible experimentation and innovation while protecting the public interest.
To cite a few examples, Singapore’s AI healthcare sandbox offers guidelines for synthetic data to minimise privacy risks while allowing realistic testing. In the UK and other countries, AI-powered innovations in financial services are being tested under supervision that helps to prevent consumer harms such as biased scoring and automated decision-making.
In AI, this approach aligns with the OECD AI Principles – specifically Principle 2.3, which encourages governments to promote experimentation to enable the safe testing and scaling of AI systems. Similarly, the Recommendation of the Council for Agile Regulatory Governance to Harness Innovation urges governments to facilitate greater experimentation, testing, and trialling to stimulate innovation under regulatory supervision.
AI regulatory sandboxes are valuable for testing new technologies and rules in a safe, controlled way before full rollout. They offer less benefit if risks are low or if rules are already well established, but can be useful for compliance and learning in more complex regulatory environments. Decisions to utilise sandboxes should follow clear criteria to ensure efforts are appropriately targeted. Generally, initiatives with high innovation potential, substantial risks, and opportunities for regulatory discovery and improvement (including by removing barriers to beneficial innovation) should be prioritised. Key regulators, industry actors and other relevant stakeholders should be involved in this process.
In July 2023, the OECD published the policy paper Regulatory Sandboxes in artificial intelligence. Building on lessons from fintech, the report highlights the benefits of AI sandboxes, including accelerating market entry, improving regulatory understanding, and stimulating investment. It also explains why adapting the traditional sandbox model to AI presents unique technical and governance challenges. As a cross-sectoral technology, AI covers multiple legal, ethical, and technical domains, requiring strong coordination among several regulatory authorities.
Since the paper’s release, the use of AI sandboxes has accelerated. By February 2025, the Datasphere Initiative identified over 60 sandboxes worldwide related to AI, data, and technology. Furthermore, key regulatory and policy frameworks, including the European Union’s AI Act and America’s AI Action Plan, view regulatory sandboxes as essential tools for fostering AI innovation and ensuring the safe development and adoption of AI.
Insights shared during the webinar by experts from Spain, Thailand, Luxembourg, Brazil, Korea, Israel and Singapore offer valuable lessons on how different jurisdictions design and operate AI sandboxes, highlighting what works, where challenges arise, and how approaches vary across contexts. For example, Spain provides appropriate, tailored guidance to ensure effectiveness and facilitate regulatory compliance further down the line. Brazil’s sequenced approach includes capacity-building to enable participants to contribute to effective experimentation and evaluation.
Six insights about AI regulatory sandboxes from around the globe
1. AI sandboxes are not uniform
According to the Datasphere Initiative, three primary types of sandboxes are emerging worldwide, especially within the context of AI. Regulatory sandboxes: Collaborative processes where regulators work with innovators to test innovations under regulatory supervision.
Operational sandboxes: Testing environments and infrastructure where data can be hosted and accessed in controlled conditions.
Hybrid models: Combining regulatory oversight with operational capabilities, sometimes offering infrastructure and operational spaces for testing and experimentation (e.g., “supercharged sandbox” in the UK).
These models intervene at different phases of the policy and regulatory lifecycle. Some are employed before formal regulation to identify gaps and suggest necessary updates. Others operate during the development process, supporting iterative regulatory design. Some focus on helping understand legal obligations and ensure regulatory compliance, such as under the EU AI Act. Sector-specific sandboxes are also common, with countries adopting different approaches depending on regulatory priorities and institutional settings. Across these models, regulatory waivers are frequently used to enable experimentation under regulatory supervision.
Several experimentation-related initiatives, such as regulatory testbeds, living labs, or policy prototyping, share certain features and objectives with regulatory sandboxes. What truly distinguishes sandboxes is that they are the most institutionalised form of regulatory experimentation, usually led by regulators and integrated with regulatory supervision.
2. Coordination is essential
AI does not always fit neatly within existing sectoral, jurisdictional, or administrative boundaries. Its development and deployment span multiple regulatory domains, making effective coordination crucial. Luxembourg’s approach demonstrates this well, showing that AI sandboxes are more than testing spaces—they are platforms for regulatory collaboration and coordination. Luxembourg’s model brings together 11 authorities and innovation actors to align priorities and prevent fragmentation, emphasising the need for skilled project management alongside legal and technical expertise.
Specific stakeholders within the AI ecosystem pursue different objectives: data protection authorities concentrate on privacy, cybersecurity authorities on resilience, and innovators on efficiency and speed. They also offer different kinds of expertise. Sandboxes can offer a neutral space to reconcile these priorities, fostering trust and mutual understanding. To achieve this, managing the expectations of involved parties and clearly defining the objectives of a sandbox are particularly important steps.
In Thailand, a multi-faceted approach to AI regulatory sandboxing shows how balancing safety and flexibility depends on agile cooperation between sectoral regulators and industry. This approach integrates three complementary pathways: in the short term, fostering AI deployment where existing rules already allow it; in the medium term, establishing sector-specific sandboxes to manage domain-specific risks and opportunities; and eventually, developing system-wide sandboxes, including for government use, to test cross-cutting applications. Together, these mechanisms help promote AI-driven innovation within current legal frameworks while leveraging testing and experimentation to better understand the implications of emerging AI applications. Effective coordination is essential to prevent duplication of effort, regulatory gaps or conflicting rules.
Sandboxes can also play a valuable role in involving expert and academic communities in the development of AI regulation, with countries such as Spain, Luxembourg, and Brazil benefiting from such expertise at multiple stages of sandbox design and operation.
3. From policy to practice, and back again
AI sandboxes are increasingly used to bridge the gap between regulatory frameworks and real-world implementation. For example, Spain’s regulatory sandbox pilot translates the EU AI Act’s requirements for high-risk AI applications into practical compliance steps, enabling early identification of gaps and clarifying obligations for deployers. In December 2025, the Spanish AI Supervision Agency (AESIA) published a series of introductory and technical resources, developed from insights gathered during the regulatory sandbox pilot, that demonstrate how sandboxes can support evidence-based compliance guidance. Luxembourg’s AI sandbox, in turn, acts as a coordination platform to ensure lessons learned on overlapping obligations feed into the domestic operationalisation of the EU AI Act and related future guidance.
In July 2025, Singapore launched its Global AI Assurance Sandbox, building on insights from a previous pilot phase, to create a testing environment where creators or deployers of GenAI applications can have their applications evaluated by expert technical testers. Key risk aspects examined during testing include hallucination, undesirable content, data leakage, and vulnerability to adversarial prompts, with the findings informing policy guidance. Brazil’s Regulatory Sandbox on AI and Data Protection also exemplifies this trend. It aims to promote transparency, privacy by design and responsible innovation in AI systems that handle personal data, using structured experimentation to help innovators achieve regulatory compliance and assist regulators in understanding how rules work in practice and where adjustments may be necessary.
Simultaneously, AI sandboxes continue to shape future regulatory frameworks. In Thailand, sector-specific sandboxes for digital payments, digital assets, banking and insurance are expected to help regulators understand real-world AI applications and prepare for system-wide governance. As sandboxes move regulation from theory to practice and back to policy, they create an iterative loop that can strengthen trust and adaptability in AI governance. To achieve this, sandboxes should generate insights to inform better regulation. This, in turn, requires consistent reporting, sharing of results, and the establishment of feedback loops across sectors and countries to boost compliance and policy development.
This is one example of a knowledge-sharing process in AI regulatory sandboxes.
Nevertheless, translating sandbox results into regulatory improvements remains challenging, even in countries like Korea, which has considerable experience conducting regulatory experiments across sectors.
4. Incentives matter
Participation in AI sandboxes is not automatic. Clear and well-designed incentives are essential for both innovators and regulators. Israel, for instance, has introduced a government fund that provides financial support, legal counselling and mentorship for regulators launching AI sandboxes, while also offering grants to participating firms. Similarly, Singapore reduces testing-related barriers to GenAI adoption through practical guidance and access to specialised testing partners.
These models recognise a fundamental challenge: AI experimentation is resource-intensive and needs to focus on areas where it matters most. Without targeted support, regulators may struggle to operate sandboxes, and companies might be hesitant to participate. Furthermore, when offering incentives, authorities should encourage a diverse mix of participants—small firms, big players, different sectors, and different AI applications—to ensure that sandbox insights are both representative and robust. The complex nature of regulatory sandboxes themselves may also pose challenges for some applicants or even participants. In this context, Brazil outlined a three-stage execution framework, starting with capacity building for selected participants undertaken by a partner university, before advancing to the experimentation and evaluation phases.
5. The growing need for interoperability and cross-border collaboration
As AI systems operate across borders, there is a growing need for AI sandboxes to extend beyond national borders. Without international coordination, firms may engage in ‘jurisdiction hopping’, seeking the most permissive regulatory environments. Interoperability between sandboxes is thus becoming a governance necessity. Cross-border collaboration is also crucial for international regulatory cooperation. In Brazil’s case, preparatory work to develop the sandbox included international consultations on the experimental methodology. This approach enables the benefit from international practices and standards and facilitates the sharing of experiences in later stages of the project.
Cross-border sandboxes have already proven their worth. Singapore’s Global AI Assurance Pilot, for example, involved 17 AI deployers from nine countries collaborating with 16 specialised testers from the US, UK and Europe. Use cases include summarisation, chatbots to AI applications in healthcare, finance and human resource management. These cross-border tests allowed regulators and companies to understand how AI performs in different legal, cultural and technical environments. For example, a chatbot that safely managed English queries inadvertently leaked confidential information when prompted in Mandarin, demonstrating the importance of multilingual testing.
6. AI sandboxes come with challenges of their own
AI sandboxes face several challenges. Regulators often encounter capacity limitations and lack the technical expertise or project management skills necessary to supervise complex AI systems. Fragmentation and coordination issues also arise, as AI spans multiple sectors and necessitates collaboration among numerous authorities, including across borders.
Designing suitable requirements and safeguards for sandbox frameworks can be challenging, especially when multiple regulatory regimes are involved, as demonstrated by Brazil. Deciding the appropriate level of transparency, human oversight, and data governance can be particularly difficult when firms seek waivers to speed up testing.
At the same time, Korea’s experience demonstrates that although safety and consumer protection rules are vital, excessively strict requirements may deter participation, especially among SMEs, and hinder experimentation. Safeguards should therefore be proportionate to and aligned with the risks posed by the technology, as overly complex procedures can undermine the agility required in regulatory sandboxes in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Measuring the impact of AI sandboxes is also difficult. Without clear metrics, sandboxes risk becoming isolated experiments rather than influential policy tools. Ideally, impact should be monitored across various areas, such as faster time-to-market for compliant AI systems, increased regulatory clarity and coherence (including through less fragmentation), and tangible updates to laws and standards shaped by sandbox insights.
Furthermore, as highlighted in a 2024 OECD policy paper, there are potential limitations concerning legality, feasibility, resources, and equity. Regulatory experiments should adhere to constitutional norms, including those concerning equal treatment.
A vital element for responsible innovation and public trust?
As a relatively new regulatory tool designed to address a rapidly evolving general-purpose technology, AI sandboxes raise significant questions about their role. Some of the questions raised during the online workshop include:
What role might civil society play in AI sandboxing?
How can public institutions build the expertise required to supervise regulatory sandboxes involving frontier-level AI systems?
How can sandboxes balance flexibility with protecting long-term societal values (e.g., what types of safeguards should be in place regarding regulatory exemptions)?
What measures, such as reporting and documentation requirements, talent management, and capacity building, are necessary to ensure transparency and build trust in AI regulatory sandboxes?
As AI governance develops and these questions are addressed, AI sandboxes hold the potential to become key tools for promoting responsible innovation, enhancing governance and building public trust in AI systems across the globe.
The OECD is well placed to advance these objectives by facilitating the systematic exchange of knowledge and expertise, and by developing standardised, comparable frameworks for measuring outcomes. It can also use its convening role to support alignment on guidance for the targeting, design and implementation of AI regulatory sandboxes. By grounding this work in empirical evidence and practical experience, the OECD can help strengthen the overall evidence base and inform more effective policy approaches.
The authors would like to thank Natalie Cohen, Lucia Russo, Guillermo Hernandez, Xavier Pearson, Viktor Samek and John Leo Tarver for their contributions to this piece.
AI agents and agentic AI based on large language models are becoming more autonomous and capable of interacting with both physical and virtual environments. As the capabilities of these AI systems grow, they are gaining visibility, and with reason. It is reaching a point where they could become the driving force behind innovation, investment and improved productivity across sectors by streamlining processes and enabling more efficient operations.
While ideas related to agency have long been explored in academic research in fields such as philosophy, economics and computer science, recent advances in AI are stretching conceptual boundaries. As AI’s capabilities evolve, so do our shared understanding of what qualifies as AI agent and agentic AI.
The OECD report, The agentic AI landscape and its conceptual foundations, developed by the OECD.AI Expert Group on Agentic AI, helps clarify what AI agents and agentic AI are and how they differ. Grounded in the OECD AI system definition, the analysis examines how these terms are defined and used across the literature. By analysing key features, overlaps and distinctions and mapping them to thecore elements of the OECD definition of an AI system, the report helps to establish more precise and consistent terminology. And in a rapidly evolving field, conceptual precision is essential for effective, well-informed governance.
Three key messages stand out in the report:
AI agents and agentic AI are closely related, but not interchangeable.
Agentic AI ought to be seen as a socio-technical paradigm.
Despite technological gaps and varying levels of maturity in areas such as digital security and privacy, uptake is growing.
The common foundations and meaningful distinctions of AI agents and agentic AI
Our analysis shows that AI agents and agentic AI share foundational characteristics. Both involve systems with a degree of autonomy that pursue goals and can perceive and act within physical and virtual environments.
However, there are differences that mean these terms are not interchangeable.
AI agents can be understood as systems that perceive and act on their environment with a degree of autonomy, using tools as needed to achieve specific goals and adapt to changing inputs and contexts.
By contrast, agentic AI generally refers to systems composed of multiple co-ordinated AI agents that can break down tasks, collaborate and pursue complex objectives autonomously over extended periods. Agentic AI systems are designed to operate in more open-ended, less predictable physical and virtual environments, and to function with minimal human supervision.
In short, agentic AI is more complex, as it can co-ordinate multiple agents, perform task decomposition and delegation, and sustain operations over longer periods. It can also operate in more complex, less predictable environments with limited human oversight.
Agentic AI as a socio-technical paradigm
Agentic AI systems are not isolated technical artefacts. They are frequently embedded in social contexts and interactions and operate within a socio-technical paradigm.
Their value lies not only in autonomous action, but in interaction with other AI agents, humans and institutional processes. Co-ordination and negotiation across these actors require advanced reasoning capabilities, robust infrastructure and reliable communication protocols.
This relational perspective is an essential part of what agentic AI is. This means that understanding how they interact within broader ecosystems is essential to designing agentic AI systems that function responsibly and effectively, particularly in open or high-stakes environments.
Uptake is accelerating, but maturity is uneven
The report also presents descriptive evidence on trends in AI agent adoption. Many developers have already integrated them into their toolkits, and survey data indicate that nearly half of respondents on Stack Overflow use them or plan to do so.
To be clear, adoption should not be confused with maturity. Developers highlight opportunities to further strengthen the security, privacy and accuracy of AI agents. These concerns underscore an important point: as the capabilities of agentic AI advance rapidly, progress in robust, trustworthy AI systems must keep pace.
A foundation for further analysis
Overall, the report provides a descriptive overview of the agentic AI landscape, clarifying key concepts and characteristics and establishing a shared analytical foundation. By anchoring the discussion in the OECD AI system definition, it aims to promote coherence across technical and policy communities.
Looking ahead, an improved understanding of real-world use will be essential to identify where safeguards, standards, and governance mechanisms will be most effective. Policy-relevant typologies that build upon this work could help guide governance efforts to distinguish systems by level of autonomy, degree of adaptiveness, domain of operation and scale of impact. Evidence-based policymaking will require more empirical data on how AI agents and agentic AI are being adopted and used across sectors, as well as clearer evidence of their broader implications and impacts.
This report contributes to a clearer, shared understanding of agentic AI and provides a basis for thoughtful, forward-looking policy grounded in conceptual clarity. As agentic AI systems become more capable of coordinating multiple AI agents, taking action and operating over longer periods, governance conversations have to keep pace.
Companies hoping to take advantage of AI’s opportunities need to be trustworthy. Whether investing in, developing, or using AI, the OECD’s new Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible AI provides businesses with an internationally agreed, government-backed tool to demonstrate that markets and societies can trust their AI systems.
Recent international reporting underscores a growing consensus: AI is not just a technological shift. It is a major geopolitical, economic, and societal phenomenon that demands coordinated action amongst all actors, including companies.
AI has the potential to transform society through productivity, economic value and solutions to complex challenges, but for these benefits to materialise, AI needs trust. So far, the technology seems to advance faster than its guardrails. The gap between AI systems and appropriate safeguards is now one of the defining challenges for policymakers and global businesses alike. Both are under pressure to balance AI innovation and diffusion with safety and risk management. Success depends on getting the balance right.
Risks throughout the AI value chain are continually evolving
Risks to people and the environment can manifest at any point along the AI value chain. The OECD actively tracks and categorises risks through its AI Incidents and Hazards Monitor.
Here are a few examples. At one end of the AI value chain, there are the people who label, clean, and moderate the vast datasets required to train AI models. They can face low wages, long hours, and suffer psychological distress from exposure to harmful content. Companies need to ensure decent work for data enrichment workers.
The environmental costs of running AI systems can also be significant, particularly for energy and water consumption by data centres that power AI development and deployment, which may lead to higher energy prices.
Data privacy is another critical concern. AI models are trained on massive datasets that may include personal or sensitive information. If these datasets are not properly anonymised and secured, it can lead to data breaches. If AI models “memorise” and reproduce sensitive data in their outputs, they can expose confidential details, creating legal and ethical dilemmas.
At the other end of the AI value chain, the potential for AI misuse poses risks such as reputational harm and the spread of misinformation. AI-generated deepfakes, for instance, can be used to create realistic but fabricated content, damaging reputations or manipulating public opinion. Similarly, AI can be used to generate and disseminate mis and dis-information at speed and scale, eroding trust in institutions and potentially influencing events.
Worldwide, governments, consumers, and markets are calling for responsible and trustworthy AI. This is one of the reasons for the surge in mandatory and voluntary AI risk management frameworks, responsible AI initiatives, global agreements, academic research and statements from industry leaders and investors. However, this surge in frameworks is also increasing complexity for companies, as risk management is defined differently across jurisdictions and understanding of AI-related risks is evolving.
OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible AI: A flexible, whole-of-value-chain approach to support businesses in navigating evolving risks and rules
This is why the OECD has now developed the first internationally agreed, government-backed Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible AI. Backed by all the OECD’s member countries, plus 17 partner governments and the EU, this Guidance helps enterprises navigate the complex terrain of AI risk management. It is designed to help businesses ensure that the AI systems they develop are trustworthy, used and developed safely and responsibly, and aligned with broad societal values.
A step-by-step framework for enterprises to set up internal management systems capable of proactively identifying and responding to risks related to human rights, labour standards, and environmental impacts.
Recommendations and implementation examples for everyone in the AI value chain, from data suppliers and infrastructure providers to financiers and end-users – including enterprises. The guidance emphasises a “whole-of-value-chain” approach to support secure and resilient AI value chains more resistant to supply chain shocks and interference.
A roadmap of related provisions in existing frameworks, indicating how each step complements and relates to relevant provisions from AI risk management frameworks. This feature helps enterprises understand how implementing this guidance can help them meet expectations from multiple sources and navigate the current landscape of AI risk management frameworks.
Responsibility and trust can give a competitive edge
Responsibility and innovation not only coexist but also reinforce each other. Companies that show a commitment to responsible AI and actively address potential risks can gain trust from investors, customers, regulators, and policymakers. This trust leads to a competitive edge. Instead of hindering innovation, responsible AI practices can speed up growth by reducing obstacles and preventing costly damage to reputation, legal issues, and society.
Responsible and trustworthy AI is becoming increasingly crucial for accessing global markets as international regulatory and voluntary risk management frameworks evolve. Companies in the AI value chain that meaningfully implement the Guidance’s recommendations can position themselves advantageously for cross-border expansion, potentially avoiding the substantial costs of retrofitting systems to meet various regional requirements.
As AI continues to develop rapidly, frameworks and best practices for responsible AI are likely to evolve as well. To help stakeholders keep pace, the OECD will launch an online navigation tool later this year with updates on new frameworks and use cases.
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 convenes at a moment of accelerated AI deployment. Governments and industry leaders are moving beyond experimentation toward integrating advanced AI systems across strategic sectors, consumer services and public administration. At the same time, major technology firms are advancing increasingly autonomous, task-oriented AI “agents”, thereby enriching the policy conversation and focusing it more on the technology’s real-world operationalisation.
In this context, the Summit reflects a broader global trend toward large-scale implementation. This shift aligns with ongoing OECD work on monitoring AI incidents and hazards, supporting the operationalisation of the OECD AI Principles, and measuring AI diffusion and understanding patterns of adoption.
The OECD and its Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) are engaged across the Summit’s agenda, working with India and other partners to translate years of analysis, data and policy frameworks into tools that policymakers can use in practice to have real impact.
Across the summit, the OECD will support this pragmatic approach with a series of events and deliverables. Details for the specific times and locations can be found on our main event webpage:
Advancing AI transparency in practice 17 February, 11:30 – 12:25 (IST) West Wing Room 4, Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre WATCH THE LIVE STREAM Co-hosted by the OECD, Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Infosys and Microsoft, this discussion will explore how to align national and regional policy frameworks with shared expectations for transparency, safety, and accountability. Anchored in the Hiroshima AI reporting framework for advanced AI systems, the discussion will explore how common reporting practices, risk disclosures, and transparency mechanisms can support both national policy objectives and cross-border trust. Participants will discuss how voluntary frameworks, such as international reporting templates, assurance mechanisms, public–private collaboration on testing and evaluation, can complement national policies by enabling faster learning cycles, supporting innovation, and fostering convergence where it matters most for safety and rights.
Democratising trust: Open source tooling for safe, secure and trustworthy AI 17 February, 13:30 – 14:25 (IST) Room 9, Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre WATCH THE LIVE STREAM Co-hosted by the OECD, the India AI Impact Summit, Mozilla Foundation, ROOST, the UK AI Security Institute, and Mistral AI, this panel will explore the practical landscape of open-source tooling for trustworthy AI. Our experts will: Take stock of the current open-source tooling ecosystem and highlight key gaps and challenges. Showcase open-source tools that enable both technical and non-technical stakeholders to monitor and assess AI safety, security, and trustworthiness. Examine how open-source approaches can help build capacity in underrepresented regions and communities. Present the OECD.AI Catalogue of Tools and Metrics for Trustworthy AI and launch an open call for submissions of open-source tools, inviting AI practitioners worldwide to contribute.
AI for inclusive and resilient food systems 20 February 2026, 14.30 – 15.30 (IST) Room 18, Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre WATCH THE LIVE STREAM The Government of the Netherlands and the OECD will co-host a flagship event on AI for inclusive and resilient food systems, with the participation of H.E. Mr. Harry Verweij, Ambassador at Large and Special Envoy AI for the Kingdom of the Netherlands and H.E. Mr. Nezar Patria, Vice Minister of Communications and Digital Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia, among other distinguished speakers. This session leverages the work of the India AI Impact Summit Working Group on Economic Growth and Social Good, co-chaired by the Netherlands and Indonesia. It explores how AI can support the transition to more transparent, responsible, and inclusive agricultural production and distribution within food systems. Discussions will draw on national initiatives and concrete use cases to highlight practical, scalable approaches to improving data sharing, interoperability, risk management, and access to high-quality agricultural data.
GPAI Ministerial Council Meeting EVENT CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC 20 February, 10:00 – 12:30 (IST) Summit Room, Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre The India AI Impact Summit will host the GPAI Council Meeting at Ministerial Level, bringing together ministers and senior representatives from GPAI members, partners and stakeholders.The ministerial meeting will provide a forum to advance GPAI’s mission to promote human-centric, safe, secure, and trustworthy AI, grounded in the OECD Recommendation on AI. Discussions will focus on shaping GPAI’s strategic direction and strengthening international collaboration amid rapid technological change.
People, planet and progress: India’s AI moment
Indian authorities and organisers frame the Summit around three pillars: People, Planet and Progress. The emphasis is on ensuring that accelerated adoption translates into inclusive growth, environmental sustainability and tangible public value.
A central theme is delivery. Discussions are expected to focus on how governments can move from strategy documents to implementation through institutional capacity building, interoperable data systems, procurement reform and accountability mechanisms. These priorities resonate with OECD work, highlighting the importance of governance frameworks that enable innovation while safeguarding rights and public trust.
Some potential outcomes from the India AI Summit
Against this backdrop of rapid adoption, infrastructure development and evolving governance challenges, the OECD’s contribution focuses on evidence, measurement and international co-operation. Through data, policy tools and a multi-stakeholder convening role, the OECD supports countries in translating ambition into accountable and inclusive AI deployment.
The success of the India AI Impact Summit could help governments to clarify answers to practical questions: how to deploy AI responsibly in public services, how to develop AI skills at scale, how to manage risks and incidents, and how to ensure AI contributes to sustainable development rather than undermining it.
Most importantly, it should help rebalance the global AI conversation. By placing everyday impact and responsibility at the forefront, the Summit recognises that the future of AI will be shaped not only in research labs and boardrooms, but also in classrooms, clinics, farms, and public administrations around the world.
Join us in Delhi
The OECD looks forward to working with India and international partners to make the India AI Impact Summit a milestone for global AI governance. We invite readers to visit the OECD.AI India AI Impact Summit agenda page to track all of our activities and engage with the discussions as they unfold.
Turning principles into practice is not easy. But it is essential. And in New Delhi this February, we have a real opportunity to move the global AI agenda forward together.
Artificial intelligence is changing fast, and the world is feeling both excited and uneasy about it. People use AI tools every day in hospitals, classrooms, companies and public services, yet the rules that guide these tools are still developing. Many governments are trying to find a balance between innovation and safety. Others are trying to make sure that AI actually improves people’s lives without widening gaps.
These summits did not occur in isolation but are part of broader global efforts to coordinate responsible approaches to AI. The G7 Hiroshima Process in 2023–24 established a shared commitment to trustworthy, human-centric AI, leading to the adoption of the Hiroshima Declaration, which calls for international cooperation on safety, transparency, and risk mitigation.
Building on that, the Paris AI Summit in 2025 moved the conversation toward implementation, with an early agreement on safety evaluations, incident-reporting mechanisms and commitments to support countries with limited technical capacity. The India AI Action Summit represents the next step in this progression: translating these collective principles into measurable on-the-ground outcomes.
In recent months, people have repeatedly asked me two questions. Why should India host such a major global meeting? And is this summit actually useful for India and the world?
The simple answer here is that the next phase of AI will not be decided by a small number of companies or countries. It will depend on whether billions of people, especially in the Global South, can use AI safely, affordably and accountably. India, with its linguistic diversity, strong digital public infrastructure and experience deploying technology at a population scale, is well positioned to help shape this practical phase.
However, AI comes with challenges related to privacy, digital exclusion and the balance between innovation and oversight. But these very tensions make India’s experience pertinent to other countries facing the same trade-offs.
This blog post explains why that matters, what the international community can expect in Delhi, and how we should measure progress at the end of the summit.
Why India, and why now
AI deployment in the Global South will shape global outcomes
Much of the world’s discussion on AI has focused on frontier models, international competition and long-term safety. These debates are important, but AI’s greatest impact will be felt in how it reaches ordinary people. From farmers and students to small businesses, frontline health workers and local governments.
More than half of the world’s population lives in countries categorised as the Global South — a term first popularised in the late 1960s to describe post-colonial economies, and one I don’t fully agree with, as it often flattens diverse countries into a single broad category.
If AI is to be truly global, it must work for multilingual, resource-constrained and diverse environments. This includes reliable translations, culturally grounded datasets, accessible interfaces and low-cost deployments. It also means designing systems that respect human rights and democratic norms even in places with limited regulatory capacity.
India sits at the intersection of these challenges. With over a billion people, 22 official languages and thousands of dialects, any technology deployed at scale must be inclusive by design. India’s experience offers lessons for many other countries navigating the same realities.
India has a strong track record in large-scale digital public infrastructure
India’s digital public infrastructure, or DPI, is one of the most widely referenced success stories of how technology can enable access and accountability. Systems like Aadhaar, UPI and DigiLocker have helped millions access identification, financial services and digital records. These platforms were built with interoperability and openness in mind, which has led to a wave of public and private innovations.
At the same time, these systems have also raised important questions about privacy, data security, and exclusion of marginalised communities who lack documentation or digital access. India’s ongoing work to address these concerns—through data protection legislation, improved grievance mechanisms, and efforts to reach the digitally excluded—provides practical lessons about implementation challenges that other countries will inevitably face.
The India AI Impact Summit is expected to draw on this experience, including both successes and areas for improvement. The global community is watching to see how India will frame the link between AI and digital public goods, and how these tools can be used responsibly in sectors such as education, healthcare and social protection.
International expectations are focusing on implementation leadership
The earlier global AI safety and governance summits created momentum. They helped identify risks, promote transparency and encourage cooperation. But now, many countries and organisations want clarity on what should happen next.
The India summit is an opportunity to shift the conversation from what AI might do to what it should deliver. This includes measurable improvements in public services, clearer accountability mechanisms and more inclusive access to AI tools. By focusing on implementation, India can complement the work of the OECD-GPAI, UNESCO and other international bodies.
What the India AI Impact Summit should prioritise
A conversation about measurable, real-world outcomes
The summit should begin by asking a straightforward question: What changes on the ground when AI is deployed responsibly at scale? To answer it, discussions need to move beyond broad aspirations and focus on concrete domains like public healthcare triage, classroom support tools, agricultural advisory systems, and other public-sector applications where impact can be seen and measured.
Government delegates should be encouraged to present evidence, not statements of intent. That means clear baselines, transparent evaluation methods, and metrics that reflect real improvements: higher diagnostic accuracy, increased crop yields and shorter benefit-processing times all achieved without compromising fairness or human oversight.
If the summit succeeds, it will shift the global conversation toward what works, for whom, and under what conditions.
Three ways the Global South can shape the international agenda
A meaningful summit requires a wide range of voices—especially from regions where AI deployment will shape social and economic outcomes for decades to come. Countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East bring their lived experiences of linguistic diversity, data scarcity, affordability constraints and uneven digital access.
The summit should create space for these countries to set priorities rather than simply respond to frameworks developed elsewhere. Their perspectives are vital for building governance models that reflect the realities of low-resource contexts, rather than idealised assumptions from high-income environments.
A more pluralistic conversation would reinforce a simple principle: responsible AI cannot be universal if it is not also contextual.
Rebalancing the narrative with the immediate societal, environmental and institutional challenges
One of the most important roles the summit can play is to broaden the global AI discourse. Today, existential risk narratives dominate many international forums, often overshadowing more immediate and systemic issues. The India AI Impact Summit should refocus attention on the present: AI’s energy footprint, labour displacement, rising misinformation, digital exclusion and the growing pressure on public institutions to oversee algorithmic systems they are not adequately equipped to oversee.
The environmental dimension deserves particular attention. Training and deploying large AI models require significant energy resources, disproportionately affecting the Global South. Many of these countries face climate vulnerability, fragile grids and competing development priorities. For regions already grappling with heatwaves, droughts and energy shortages, the cost of “AI at scale” cannot be separated from broader planetary concerns. If AI is to be deployed responsibly, discussions must also consider energy and natural resource efficiency and equitable access to compute.
These issues determine how people experience AI today and whether they trust it tomorrow. Giving them equal weight would help correct the imbalance in global discussions and lead to governance that addresses risks people actually face, not only those imagined at the far horizon.
Potential wins for the India AI Impact Summit
Practical pathways for responsible public-sector deployment
Across sectors, governments are eager to use AI to strengthen healthcare, expand access to education and streamline welfare delivery. Yet many lack clarity on how to procure, evaluate or oversee these systems responsibly. A meaningful outcome of the summit would be simple, actionable pathways that public agencies can adopt without specialised expertise. These might take the form of evaluation checklists with acceptable error and bias thresholds, procurement templates with human oversight requirements, or clear guidance on when and how officials should override an AI recommendation. Transparent case studies and training for civil servants would also help countries move from hesitation to informed, confident experimentation.
Strengthened mechanisms for trust and accountability
Concerns about misinformation, bias, privacy and security continue to rise, and many countries, particularly those with limited technical capacity, need practical tools to manage these risks. The summit could make a real contribution by advancing shared approaches to incident reporting, auditing and assurance, as well as safety testing methods that work across varied deployment contexts. Small pilot frameworks would help establish a common baseline of accountability. Such efforts would not only support global cooperation but also build public trust at a time when many citizens and policymakers remain uncertain about the reliability of AI systems.
Broader cooperation on multilingual and inclusive AI with robust safety infrastructure
Many countries struggle with adapting AI to their unique linguistic profiles. India’s long-standing work in language technologies positions it to convene collaborations on multilingual and inclusive AI. New partnerships on datasets, dialect-specific models, local-first interfaces and research on linguistic bias could meaningfully expand access for millions of people worldwide.
But inclusion must be matched with safeguards. As AI tools become more widely available, countries will need parallel investments in risk-assessment expertise, regional coordination on harmful content and support for the development of first-generation regulatory frameworks. Striking the right balance between openness and safety would reinforce core OECD AI Principles and help ensure expanded access does not bring greater vulnerability.
Broader implications for global AI policy
Everyday impact before frontier risks
Research on frontier AI risks must continue, but the India AI Impact Summit signals an important rebalancing of global attention, as mentioned before. It asks policymakers to look beyond hypothetical future scenarios to acknowledge how AI is already shaping critical aspects of our daily lives, from healthcare triage and classroom instruction to welfare delivery, agricultural advice and urban mobility.
For most people, the urgent question is not whether AI poses an existential threat, but whether the systems they encounter today are reliable, safe and genuinely useful. The summit’s focus on practical impact aligns global governance with lived reality.
Ensuring AI benefits for everyone
A second implication is the reaffirmation that inclusion is not a downstream concern but a prerequisite for responsible AI. Global conversations often gravitate toward powerful models built in highly resourced environments, yet billions of people rely on limited connectivity, low digital literacy and minority-language interfaces.
India’s leadership places these conditions at the centre of the global agenda. It broadens the imagination of what “good AI” must account for, reminding the world that both equitable deployment and cutting-edge capability are essential to whether AI helps or harms societies.
Building a more open and collaborative ecosystem
The summit also nudges the world toward a more open and cooperative model of AI development. Some countries can share tools, datasets, and governance mechanisms to help each other build their own capabilities rather than remain passive consumers. Openness here is not about lowering standards; it is about raising the global floor and ensuring that safety capacity grows alongside access. Many countries want to participate meaningfully in the AI economy, and the summit offers a platform to explore practical pathways for doing so.
What the world should take away from Delhi
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is more than just another international meeting because it represents a shift from abstract debates to concrete action. Its core question — how to make AI useful, safe and inclusive at scale — goes to the heart of global governance. If the summit delivers practical tools, clearer deployment pathways and stronger cross-regional collaboration, it will set a new benchmark for what international coordination on AI can achieve.
The world is watching India, not because it claims to have all the answers, but because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to turn large-scale ideas into real-world outcomes. And it has done so while openly confronting the tensions and trade-offs that accompany such efforts. In a period of rapid technological change, this experience is invaluable.
As AI evolves, the global community will increasingly need countries that can translate principles into practice at a population scale. The India AI Impact Summit is a chance to advance that work. If successful, its influence will extend far beyond India, shaping how the world understands and pursues responsible AI in the years ahead.
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