A Difficult Act to Maintain

In “Where Is Singapore’s AI Regulation Headed?” (Issues, Summer 2025), Manoj Harjani starts by recounting its delicate balancing act in governing artificial intelligence. The city-state is able to maintain credibility on the global stage while remaining pragmatically grounded in technical experimentation, maintaining policy realism without overcommitting to rigid legal frameworks.

The choice to adopt a regulatory “light touch” is often framed as a way to maintain flexibility, avoid overregulation, and enable innovation. But this obscures the extent to which this posture is itself a political and economic settlement—one that reinforces Singapore’s position in the global digital economy by facilitating capital and technology flows rather than seeking to govern them more directly.

From a structural perspective, no country’s domestic regulatory choices can be understood in isolation. They are framed by three global flows: data, capital, and computational capacity. These form the real architecture of the digital economy, and Singapore’s policies—voluntary, modular, and implementation-oriented—are calibrated to optimize its position, reassuring transnational investors and firms of its alignment with international norms and its commitment to regulatory predictability.

But the very notion that innovation must be protected from government overreach rests on a profound historical sleight of hand. The global AI ecosystem is the product not of unbridled private enterprise but of decades of public investment—particularly by the US defense sector—and of carefully designed industrial policies across East Asia. The chip economy that underpins AI was shaped by Cold War priorities and postwar developmental states. Indeed, Singapore’s place in this system owes much to its sophisticated deployment of fiscal policy, infrastructure investment, and state-capital coordination.

In this light, soft regulation is not neutrality, but a strategic decision to let infrastructure be built primarily by market actors. As the legal scholar Elettra Bietti reminds us, the decision to privatize data governance has far-reaching effects on power, control, and accountability. The law plays a significant role in framing the problem-space, but the assumptions we make about the law and the economy and society it governs inform the framework that emerges in any given regulatory effort.

Singapore’s position is perhaps uniquely complex. It must navigate the turbulence of great power competition, remain open to global flows of technology and investment, and maintain its domestic regulatory autonomy—all while managing significant social concerns around inequality, exclusion, and digital trust. In this balance, Singapore may need to reappraise the latitude it currently gives to technology firms, and a sector-based “hardening” of regulation might well be in order as AI is deployed at industrial scale.

Zooming out, if Singapore is to set a benchmark in the governance of just digital futures, then its regulatory ambition may need to expand. Uncomfortably, perhaps, Singapore—and the rest of us—must ask not only what AI can do, but also for whom it is being built, and at what cost.

Jason Grant Allen