Taiwan AI Basic Act sets landmark national regulation framework

Taiwan’s AI Basic Act is one of the clearest signs yet that mid-sized tech economies are moving from soft guidelines to hard law on AI. For the race to AGI, it shows that governments don’t intend to sit on the sidelines while frontier models evolve; they want statutory levers over who deploys what, in which sectors, and under what safeguards. That kind of clarity can actually accelerate investment, because companies finally know the rules they’re building against rather than guessing where regulators will land. ([telecomreviewasia.com](https://www.telecomreviewasia.com/news/policy-news/27928-taiwan-passes-landmark-ai-regulation-law/))

Strategically, Taiwan is signaling it wants to be an AI hub, not just a chip foundry. Placing the National Science and Technology Council at the center and mandating a national AI development committee gives the state a coordinating brain for everything from compute policy to high‑risk AI oversight. In a world where U.S., EU and Chinese rules are fragmenting, Taiwan’s framework may become a template for other Asian democracies that want to stay open to global models while keeping a strong focus on privacy, fairness and explainability. For leading labs and cloud providers, this adds another important jurisdiction they must explicitly design for, alongside the EU AI Act and U.S. sectoral rules.