AI Governance: A Research Agenda

Claims that cite this source · 3

1. Interpretation· confidence high· passage checked

   “Field of inquiry and practice” keeps together two senses that the definitions surveyed tend to separate: AI governance as a field of study (Dafoe) and as a set of instruments that organisations or governments use (Mäntymäki et al., Kenya). Hua and Belfield’s “study or practice” does the same.

2. Interpretation· confidence medium· passage checked

   Adaptability is common: the OECD, the UN advisory body, Japan, Kenya, the African Union and the World Bank all expect governance to be agile or regularly revised. Acting before arrangements set is rarer. Dafoe urges embedding principles while the stakes are relatively low, and Ojanen et al. draw on Guston’s anticipatory governance (“while effective intervention is still possible”), but none of the definitions compared here builds that timing into the definition of AI governance itself. This is the clause in which AIGovSpec departs most from them.

3. Interpretation· confidence medium· passage checked

   Read in order, the documents move from field-defining scholarship and principles (2017–2021), to organisational management systems and risk functions (2020–2023), to national strategies, laws and standing international bodies (2024–2026). The term spreads faster than any shared definition of it.