Comparative AI Law: An Introduction

We stand at a curious moment in the history of law and technology. Nations around the world are scrambling to regulate or deregulate artificial intelligence, each convinced they are in a “race”—for dominance, for values, for the future itself. Brussels votes on comprehensive AI Acts. Beijing issues the world’s first copyright ruling on AI-generated content. Washington debates whether chatbots should have First Amendment rights. The underlying premise of this volume is that this framing as a zero-sum competition fundamentally misunderstands both the nature of AI and the task before us. The truth is more sobering and more hopeful: We are not racing against each other but experimenting together, trying to govern technologies that respect neither borders nor traditional legal categories. The real question is not who will “win” the AI race, but how we can learn from each other’s experiments fast enough to keep pace with systems that evolve by the microsecond. This Special Issue of the German Law Journal brings together fifteen contributions that demonstrate why comparative law has never been more essential—or more challenging. The authors span continents and legal traditions, from Beijing to Brussels, from Silicon Valley to Sydney.