AI governance is developing as a fragmented, unevenly representative system whose global norms are overwhelmingly non-binding.
Artificial intelligence presents an unusually difficult problem for global governance. The technology develops rapidly, crosses borders easily, and is shaped by actors whose resources and capabilities may rival those of states. Yet international responses remain fragmented, unevenly representative, and overwhelmingly non-binding. The challenge is therefore not simply to identify appropriate rules or institutions, but to understand who has the capacity and incentive to create, enforce, and adapt them. This review essay examines these questions through Matthijs Maas’s Architectures of Global AI Governance. Maas offers an ambitious framework for thinking about AI governance through the lenses of sociotechnical change, governance disruption, and regime complexity. His account usefully resists both technological determinism and the search for a single institutional blueprint, emphasizing instead the possibilities of a fragmented and evolving governance architecture. The essay argues, however, that institutional design cannot be separated from the distribution of power. Maas frequently invokes what “we” should do about AI, but that collective subject obscures important differences among states, international institutions, and technology companies. States retain formidable powers over markets, infrastructure, strategic inputs, and firms themselves. At the same time, many consequential decisions about frontier AI — what is built, how quickly, with what safeguards, and when it is released — are concentrated within a small number of private companies. The central problem of global AI governance may therefore be less architecture without an architect than an emerging architecture shaped by multiple actors possessing different forms of power, divergent incentives, and no common set of plans.
For all the storm and fury, Maas himself acknowledges that the vast majority of normative movement at the global level is non-binding. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Human rights norms emerged over the course of the twentieth century in significant part because of a conscious effort to start with commitments that were wider in participation than they were deep
States retain regulatory and coercive power, while frontier AI companies increasingly control technical decisions, infrastructure, and expertise, and many consequential decisions about what is built, safeguarded, and released are concentrated within a small number of private companies.