As artificial intelligence expands across geopolitical boundaries, AI’s meteoric rise in utility has made it a ubiquitous debate all over the world. With such unrelenting speed of development and wide-ranging implications for digital infrastructure come new challenges to not only technological governance but the fundamentals of security as well. Though the Hiroshima AI Process of 2023 represented a great step forward for AI legislation at the time, countries worldwide must continue their work to ensure the safe use of this unpredictable and rapidly evolving technology. Furthermore, with AI becoming a national asset as well as a tool, how do countries in Asia, including Japan, go about promoting its development while ensuring cyber and tech security?

In a region as diverse as the Indo-Pacific, the speed at which AI can be developed and deployed varies extremely, and catch-all solutions to rulemaking and deployment pose a significant challenge. Even as the G7 Kananaskis summit pledged to “close all digital divides between and within countries” and focus more on inclusive language modeling, fundamental issues remain. How can AI development be kept responsible, ethical, and human centric across legislatory, capability, and ideological differences? How can countries and major tech players effectively utilize mechanisms such as public-private partnerships in order to foster development in areas underserved by this technology?