Taiwan passes AI Basic Law naming science council as regulator

Taiwan’s AI Basic Law is one of the first attempts outside Europe to craft a horizontal legal framework for AI, and it lands at an interesting point on the spectrum between the EU’s heavily prescriptive AI Act and the largely soft‑law approaches in the US, UK and Japan. By rooting governance in a science and technology body, while explicitly mandating risk classification, high‑risk accountability mechanisms, and protections for labour and data rights, Taipei is trying to future‑proof its AI ecosystem without freezing it. The creation of a national AI strategy council chaired by the premier signals that AI will be treated as a cross‑cutting national priority, not just a tech policy issue.

For the race to AGI, Taiwan’s move matters less because of its domestic market size and more because of its role in the semiconductor and hardware stack. A jurisdiction that combines world‑class chip fabrication, dense AI supply chains, and now a relatively innovation‑friendly but principled AI law could become a testbed for how to operationalize risk‑based governance around frontier deployment. It also adds pressure on regional peers like Japan and South Korea to clarify their own AI legal frameworks if they want to stay competitive in attracting talent and capital tied to high‑end compute.