AI Policy – How Are Governments Responding?

Stanford University's 2026 AI Index Report finds that AI policy is no longer only about regulation — governments are also investing to build domestic capacity across infrastructure, data, talent, and models.

Here we summarise the key findings on how governments are responding. Click here for our overview of the report, and here for our deeper dives on responsible AI, and AI and the economy.

National strategies are expanding

More countries adopted national AI strategies in 2024 and 2025, with particular momentum among emerging economies. New frameworks have surfaced across sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central Asia, and Latin America. In 2024, more than half of newly adopted strategies came from emerging economies.

AI sovereignty is a central theme

AI sovereignty — a state's capacity to make independent decisions over the development, deployment, and governance of AI — is emerging as a central principle of national AI policy. Between 2018 and 2025, Europe and Central Asia expanded state-backed AI supercomputing clusters from 3 to 44.

One aspect of infrastructure sovereignty - according to the report "the scale and availability of state-owned or state-backed AI supercomputing facilities is increasingly used as an indicator of “compute sovereignty” alongside related measures such as domestic access to advanced chips, cloud capacity, and the governance arrangements that determine who can use these resources and for what purposes." The report includes examples of different approaches, ranging from private clusters (the majority), government backed cloud compute, and public-private compute, including sometimes focussing on specific actors and sectors such as telecoms. According to the report, "These initiatives illustrate how private firms are playing an increasingly central role in building what many governments designate as national AI infrastructure".

Another aspect is data sovereignty - "the extent to which states or local actors have agency over how their data is collected, stored, processed, and transferred". Data localisation measures have increased across nearly every region since 2000, in the EU in particular alongside the implementation of GDPR.

Other angles which the report covers include model, application, and talent sovereignty.

Legislative activity is growing — but diverging

Between 2016 and 2025, the US passed 25 AI-related laws, the most of any G20 country, followed by South Korea with 17. Japan, Italy, and South Korea each passed dedicated national AI laws in 2025. In the US, state legislatures passed 150 AI-related bills in 2025, up from fewer than 10 in 2020. At the federal level, however, policy shifted toward deregulation following the revocation of the Biden-era executive order on AI.

If you would like to discuss how current or future regulations impact what you do with AI, please contact Brian Wong, Tom Whittaker, Lucy Pegler, Martin Cook, Liz Griffiths or any other member in our Technology team. For the latest on AI law and regulation, see our blog and newsletter.

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