Public Defense: The Global Governance of AI — Johannes Geith

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses one of the most consequential governance challenges of the 21st century. Consequently, a range of actors, including states, international organizations, and non-state actors, recognize AI as a critical domain for strategic competition and risk mitigation. While policymakers around the world grapple with the question of whether and how to regulate AI, the focus of attention has recently shifted to the global level. Yet to date, we lack systematic knowledge about the patterns and drivers of global AI governance. To that end, this dissertation provides a systematic analysis of three areas of the governance process that hold considerable promise for deepening our understanding of the global governance of AI: actor preferences, bargaining dynamics, and institutional design. Through four independent papers, this dissertation makes substantive theoretical and empirical contributions to address shortcomings in prior research.

Theoretically, it develops novel and testable arguments about the global governance of AI. Empirically, it spearheads a comprehensive analysis of global AI governance through large-scale data collection efforts for each of the singular papers, utilizing various methods for descriptive and explanatory analysis. The dissertation finds that global AI governance is characterized by three core patterns: heterogeneous actors, institutional fragmentation, and a predominance of nonbinding rules. Two factors emerge consistently across the papers as drivers of these patterns: divergence of interests among relevant actors and uncertainty about AI. This dissertation makes contributions to three overarching bodies of literature: AI governance, global digital governance, and global governance.

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