AIF Insights No. 33 (2025) | AI, Sovereignty, and the Fragmentation of Global Norms: A Legal Pluralism Perspective

Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly challenges the state-centric foundations of international law and the conventional notion of sovereignty. Unlike traditional governance anchored in territorial authority, AI systems function transnationally, drawing on global datasets and shaped by multinational corporations and supranational institutions. This paper adopts legal pluralism as a conceptual framework to examine the fragmented and overlapping legal regimes that govern AI, encompassing national laws, international treaties, corporate standards, and ethical principles. It highlights how regional regulatory divergences—exemplified by the European Union’s rights-based model and the innovation-driven approaches of the United States and China—create normative conflicts and compliance challenges for global actors. While such fragmentation is often interpreted as a governance deficit, this paper argues that it can be re-conceptualized as polycentric governance, where multiple centers of authority coexist and interact without requiring a single locus of control. The analysis concludes that developing interoperable legal orders is essential for reconciling national autonomy with the need for transnational cooperation. Legal pluralism provides a pathway toward inclusive, adaptive, and ethically grounded AI regulation that balances sovereignty with global accountability.