Governing Artificial Intelligence: Law, Institutions, and the Global Order

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the legal, economic, and geopolitical landscape at a pace that outstrips existing institutional and policy frameworks. This seminar examines the governance of advanced AI across different jurisdictions in three interconnected dimensions. The first considers how governance choices and incentives at the level of AI developers themselves, such as OpenAI's (former) non-profit structure to benefit corporations and long-term benefit trusts used by Anthropic, shape organizational accountability and risk-taking in high-stakes technology development. The second addresses the regulation of frontier AI risks, including AI-enabled threats in the CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) and cyber domains as well as loss of control and large-scale manipulation, with particular attention to the institutional capacity of regulators in the EU, US, Canada, and China, and the challenges of enforcing rules extraterritorially, e.g., when the EU's AI Act reaches US and Chinese developers. The third examines the democratic, macroeconomic and distributional consequences of AI, asking how the gains from transformative AI are likely to be distributed across frontier powers, middle powers like Canada, and developing countries, and what policies and the changing international order can or might offer in response.