The U.S. and China may not agree on much, but both acknowledge the need to regulate AI—and fast. In March, the U.S. endorsed a nonbinding United Nations General Assembly resolution, sponsored by China, that called for greater oversight of AI. A few months later, Washington voted for a China-sponsored UN resolution that called for closing the gap in AI capability between rich and poor nations.
But where does that leave Southeast Asia, a quickly growing region with a tech-savvy population?
“We’re a hybrid region,” Gullnaz Baig, executive director of the nonprofit Angsana Council, said last week at the Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore conference. “We love each other, and yet at the same time, we’re always looking over our shoulder and wondering what our neighbors are doing.”
That’s encouraging a healthy balance between regulation and innovation in Southeast Asia. “Regulation always comes fast and quick here. We always need to keep a sense of the pulse. But at the same time, we like to keep an ecosystem that’s open to innovation,” Baig said.
China, the U.S., and Europe have each developed their own approaches to regulating AI, which could be a hassle for companies trying to operate in different markets and navigate different regulatory regimes.
Businesses are “looking for that commonality,” said Evi Fuelle, director of global policy for Credo AI. Yet AI regulations may be more alike than they are different. “We’ve seen a lot of commonality, even between things like the EU AI Act and the White House executive order on AI,” she said.
But unlike the U.S. or China, or even the European Union, Southeast Asian companies need to grapple with differing levels of development and different political systems across the region.
Singapore, for example, is a small and wealthy free-market city-state with living standards exceeding even the most developed countries. Vietnam is a fast-growing economy dominated by state-owned enterprises. The Philippines is a raucous democracy with a services sector tightly connected to Western economies.
“It’s actually very hard to go across borders,” Baig said. She pointed to issues around business recognition, cybersecurity, and cross-border flows as things stopping businesses from leveraging “the true potential that is Southeast Asia.”
And not everyone is willing to go along with a regional plan. “You do see some bigger markets in the region leaning towards protecting their own domestic market by putting up regulatory barriers,” she said, without naming examples.
Indonesia has banned social media platforms from offering e-commerce services, ostensibly to protect local small enterprises. On Tuesday, it reimposed tariffs on textiles from China.
Still, all the speakers agreed that there’s value in building a common framework for AI regulations in Southeast Asia.
“The good thing is that there is a fairly consistent set of principles around responsible AI,” said Zee Kin Yeong, CEO of the Singapore Academy of Law. That makes it easier for Southeast Asian governments to use other rule sets as a template for their own rules on AI.
“It’s really up to us … to try and get something done, and not just wait for the disruption to happen,” he said.