Oswaldo Maxwell has posted The Compliance Fork: Structural Fragmentation in Global AI Governance on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Global AI standardization is commonly described as fragmented, often with the implication that fragmentation is a temporary coordination deficit awaiting harmonization. This Article advances a narrower claim. Fragmentation is better understood as a stable equilibrium of a non-hierarchical regime complex in which identical technical systems generate non-fungible compliance artifacts when they cross sovereign legal perimeters. To clarify that condition, the Article introduces the Governance Typology Matrix, a conceptual map organized along two axes: legal enforceability and institutional objective. The Matrix shows why the putative center of harmonization remains structurally vacant. Instruments drafted to function as binding, rights-oriented compliance infrastructure do not travel cleanly into regimes optimized for voluntary, market-oriented interoperability, and the inverse is equally true. The Article then traces the mechanics and consequences of that vacancy. Upstream, incompatible jurisprudential baselines, institutional mandates, standards-body procedures, risk taxonomies, and evidentiary postures prevent the emergence of a universally portable governance artifact. Downstream, multinational deployers respond through a Compliance Fork that separates a relatively stable technical core from jurisdiction-specific governance wrappers and, where necessary, deployment-layer feature constraints. That adaptation produces a recurring cost profile, described here as the Fragmentation Tax, expressed through redundant evidentiary production, duplicated infrastructure, and administrative friction in cross-border deployment. The contribution is intentionally diagnostic. It does not propose harmonization strategy, institutional reform, or a preferred regulatory model. Its narrower objective is to explain why fragmentation in global AI governance is not best treated as a transitional coordination failure, but as an enduring institutional condition.
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