Mingdong He has posted A Floor, Not A Ceiling: The Form of an AI Rule Matters More Than Its Strictness on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Debate over AI governance runs along a single axis from permissive to restrictive, requiring legislators to resolve contested risk estimates before they can act. We identify a prior question, answerable from a proposal’s text: does the instrument prohibit conduct, or license persons? We call the first a floor, the second a ceiling, and offer a six-part test that classifies any draft provision on its face. Applied clause by clause to the EU AI Act, the test classifies the prohibited-practices articles as floors and the conformity-assessment architecture as a ceiling, discriminating within a single statute. It does not track political alignment: a safety-advocate prohibition and an industry-proposed standards body classify alike. GDPR evidence shows compliance costs declining monotonically in firm size. Pharmaceutical authorization identifies where ceilings are warranted, and why frontier AI research does not qualify.
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Lawrence Solum