Larry Catá Backer (Pennsylvania State University – Penn State Dickinson Law) has posted The Implementation Opinions on Intelligent Agents in Comparative Perspective: Situating China’s Approach Within Global Regulatory Trends on Agentic AI on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This working paper undertakes a structured comparative reading of thirteen instruments addressing the governance of agentic artificial intelligence—systems capable of sustained, multi-step, tool-using autonomous action—issued between late 2024 and mid-2026 by jurisdictions with markedly different political-economic systems and governance traditions. The instruments span binding legislation (the EU AI Act; Japan’s Act on Promotion of AI-Related Technologies), executive orders and presidential memoranda (the Trump Executive Order of June 2026, Trump NSPM-11, Biden Executive Order 14110, Biden NSM-25), intergovernmental recommendations (the OECD Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence), regional development strategies (the African Union Continental AI Strategy), voluntary governance frameworks (Singapore’s Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI v1.5, the Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime framework), cybersecurity guidance (the Five Eyes/Australia advisory on careful adoption of agentic AI services), government employee guidance (Canada’s Treasury Board Secretariat Guide), analytical frameworks (the Gradient Institute’s risks-and-controls framework for multi-agent systems), and aspirational international instruments (UN General Assembly Resolution 79/325, the UN High-Level Advisory Body report). The primary object of inquiry is China’s Implementation Opinions on the Standardized Application and Innovative Development of Intelligent Agents (2026).
Drawing on prior analytical work—which conceptualizes AI governance through the lenses of AI as strategic infrastructure, the development-security dialectic, platforms as governance intermediaries, the instrumentalisation question (the risk that the relationship between autonomous technology and its wielders may be reversed), and the ‘cognitive cage’ metaphor for the political-economic structures that constrain regulatory imagination—the analysis suggests that the near-simultaneity of these instruments may reflect a shared recognition that agentic AI poses governance challenges existing frameworks do not adequately address. Yet the convergence on vocabulary—autonomy, oversight, accountability, transparency—appears to mask sharp operative divergences that become visible only when these terms are traced to their institutional and normative contexts. The instruments may be read as revealing competing conceptions of what governance is for: fundamental rights protection (EU), market integrity (Singapore), cybersecurity (Five Eyes), bureaucratic accountability (Canada), development and the bridging of capability gaps (AU), socialist modernization under party-state coordination (China), and market sovereignty fused with national security (US). The instrumentalisation question—what happens when agents do not merely assist governance but perform it—remains, the analysis suggests, inadequately addressed by all instruments examined.
The paper concludes by considering path dependence and what might be characterized as techno-bureaucratic mimicry—Nietzsche’s herd instinct refracted through the practices of benchmarking and landscape analysis—while observing the paradox that the very conformity these practices produce also generates variation, and that the gap between rhetoric (which foregrounds difference) and operative text (which may reveal a narrower bandwidth of actual divergence) poses questions about the depth of the disagreements the instruments appear to embody.
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Lawrence Solum