Artificial intelligence (AI) is both a technology story and a policy challenge. Governments across sectors and regions are grappling with the same question: how to effectively support the safe, trustworthy development and use of AI in ways that align with their countries’ needs?
Whether setting a national AI strategy or designing concrete initiatives to implement it, governments need guidance that meets them where they are. From experience, I can attest that the hardest part is rarely agreeing on principles; it is finding concrete, comparable examples of how others made them work. That is the gap the OECD AI Policy Toolkit closes.
Released yesterday by the OECD under the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), the AI Policy Toolkit is the first version of a practical, non-prescriptive guide for policymakers to translate the OECD AI Principles into action—a deliberate shift from defining what good AI policy requires to showing how to build it.
What the Toolkit does
The Toolkit is an interactive, evolving platform to support policymakers throughout the AI policy cycle. It complements OECD.AI’s broader ecosystem of tools for data, analysis and AI governance.
The Toolkit helps governments target and prioritise where to act. Through AI-powered semantic search, it surfaces relevant policy examples and guidance drawn from real-world practice, turning the OECD’s accumulated evidence into options a policymaker can use the same day—rather than a library to be read.
Built with policy-makers, not just for them
A year ago, the 2025 OECD Ministerial Council Meeting set this work in motion. What followed was less a drafting exercise than a year of listening—and the Toolkit released today reflects what countries told us they needed.
Far from being a top-down exercise, the OECD Secretariat developed the Toolkit with end-users through co-creation across regions. Targeted interviews and four co-creation workshops across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa—one of which Costa Rica was proud to host—brought policymakers, industry and experts together to shape its design around how governments actually work and make decisions.
Not only did these co-creation workshops highlight both shared challenges and region-specific priorities. They grounded the Toolkit in fundamental policy questions:
How to navigate trade-offs between local and global AI models, or between innovation and regulation?
How to address infrastructure gaps, such as AI compute capacity?
How to scale AI in agriculture, education or healthcare?
Two lessons that shaped the Toolkit
Moreover, the collaborative approach to developing the Toolkit has yielded important collective lessons.
First, context is decisive: AI policy must reflect national needs and preferences, institutional capacity and levels of digital maturity.
Second, addressing shared global challenges such as managing risks posed by advanced AI systems or ensuring diverse linguistic and cultural representation in AI models requires international cooperation as well as tailored policy responses.
Our sincere thanks go to the governments and organisations that, alongside Costa Rica, made this possible—notably Italy, France, Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the French Development Agency and the Inter-American Development Bank—and to the policymakers and experts who contributed their time and insight. I also commend the OECD Secretariat for its sustained work.
What comes next
The OECD Ministerial Council Meeting (MCM) marks the Toolkit’s first release, which is an important milestone, but it is far from the finish line.
As AI technologies and related policy issues develop, the OECD remains dedicated to ensuring the Toolkit stays relevant through regular updates by:
Refining and improving the Toolkit through ongoing feedback and iteration
Incorporating more policy examples and use cases to strengthen its practical relevance via the OECD.AI Policy Navigator
Expanding its coverage of emerging policy issues, including sector-specific guidance, infrastructure and regulatory approaches
From shared principles to shared practice
The OECD AI Policy Toolkit results from a collaborative effort to transform AI principles into implementation. By integrating OECD standards with regional insights, it guides policymakers in leveraging AI’s opportunities while responsibly and effectively managing its challenges.
The Toolkit’s success will be measured not by its launch but by the policies it helps shape. Its impact depends on sustained collaboration and support. A year from now, I expect us to point to concrete cases where this tool moved a country from principle to practice—better AI policies for better lives.
Across major economies, trustworthy artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from high-level policy to deployment in core industries such as health, manufacturing and mobility. The European Union is positioning itself for this shift by focusing not only on innovation capacity but also on trustworthy and coordinated implementation across its Member States. Gaining a deeper understanding of where AI is already being applied and gathering evidence on determinants of adoption are essential to assess Europe’s competitiveness and policy readiness.
The European Union is pursuing its ambition to become a global leader in trustworthy AI, moving from high-level policy to on-the-ground implementation. The OECD worked closely with the European AI Office to monitor efforts to develop trustworthy AI and promote its development across the European economy, with a two-volume publication series analysing how this transition is taking place in practice. The first volume focuses primarily on national strategies, initiatives and governance mechanisms for AI in EU Member States. The second, Progress in Implementing the European Union Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence (Volume 2), shifts the lens to sector-specific impact.
The report supports efforts by the European Commission and EU Member States to promote the development, deployment, and use of AI technologies across priority sectors. It draws on extensive multi-stakeholder engagement, including semi-structured interviews with industry experts and insights from dedicated stakeholder workshops. It focuses on concrete use cases that address specific needs in agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing and mobility, selected high-impact sectors where AI can contribute to digitalisation, sustainability and economic resilience. These sectors are most prominently featured across national AI strategies (Figure 1) as priority sectors for AI applications.
Figure 1. Key priority sectors in national AI strategies and policies of EU Member States
Agriculture: from precision to sustainability
Globally, agricultural producers are increasingly turning to AI-enabled precision tools to address labour shortages, environmental pressures and resource constraints. Within Europe, similar dynamics are shaping experimentation with AI-supported farming systems aligned with environmental targets under the European Green Deal.
As AI-driven solutions help optimise resources, reduce chemical inputs and maintain yields, the EU’s agricultural sector is exploring AI deployment to address structural workforce shortages and sustainability requirements. AI-powered agricultural robots and crop and soil monitoring systems are playing a growing role in improving resource efficiency.
Robs4Crops, for instance, illustrates how computer vision and sensor-based systems can enable autonomous mechanical weeding and spraying in vineyards, crop fields and apple orchards. AI4SoilHealth, in turn, is developing an open-access, AI-driven digital infrastructure to help assess and monitor soil health metrics across Europe.
At the same time, many initiatives remain at pilot or experimental stages. Limited digital infrastructure in rural areas, fragmented and inaccessible datasets (due to the resources required to collect high-quality, diverse data across crops, soil, and livestock, and to limited interoperability of existing public datasets), financial barriers, and uncertainty over return on investment continue to constrain large-scale adoption.
Healthcare: enhancing diagnostics and operations
Health systems worldwide are using AI to improve diagnostic accuracy and manage increasing service demand. In Europe, demographic ageing and workforce shortages are strengthening the case for deploying AI across both clinical and operational settings.
AI can help address rising costs and workforce shortages in healthcare while improving patient outcomes through faster and more accurate diagnostics.
One of the most impactful use cases is AI-enhanced medical imaging for the early detection of conditions such as cancer, supported by initiatives including the European Cancer Imaging Initiative. Similar approaches are already being deployed in the United States and Japan, where AI-assisted radiology is helping reduce diagnostic backlogs, highlighting the strategic importance of scaling comparable capabilities across Europe.
Beyond clinical care, the report explores how AI is improving hospital operations. Predictive and optimisation AI systems can help forecast patient inflows and manage bed occupancy, helping healthcare providers reduce staff pressure and waiting times. Perplex, an EU-funded initiative, illustrates how AI can help automate and optimise scheduling and resource management in the outpatient department of a hospital in Madrid.
Despite this potential, barriers such as fragmented health data environments and trust challenges remain significant constraints.
Manufacturing: the rise of industrial intelligence
Competitiveness in the manufacturing sector increasingly depends on integrating AI into production systems, supply chains, and quality control processes. While other major economies are accelerating investment in smart factories, adoption across Europe remains uneven.
AI adoption in EU manufacturing remains modest and highly fragmented, with pharmaceuticals and electronics leading the way, while traditional industries such as textiles and food processing progress more slowly.
Despite these differences, there are areas where AI could have a substantial impact. The report highlights three priority use cases: predictive maintenance, quality assurance and control, and supply chain optimisation.
Predictive maintenance systems, such as those developed through the Made in Europe Partnership, analyse sensor data to forecast equipment failures and reduce costly downtime. In quality control, AI-powered inspection improves efficiency by identifying defects in real time. Comparable smart-manufacturing deployments in East Asia and the United States demonstrate how scaling such applications can strengthen productivity growth and industrial resilience.
Mobility: navigating toward a connected future
Transport systems are becoming increasingly data-driven as cities and logistics operators deploy AI to improve safety, efficiency and sustainability. Across Europe, mobility-sector deployment is closely linked to broader digital and climate transition strategies.
AI can help transport and mobility systems become safer, more efficient and more sustainable. AI-enabled traffic management systems, such as those explored in the AI4Cities project, can reduce congestion by dynamically adjusting traffic-light patterns. Automated driving technologies and intelligent freight logistics systems can further optimise routes and scheduling efficiency. Here, the EU Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM) Partnership aims to accelerate the transition from research prototypes to real-world applications.
These developments are intended to align with the Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy, although gaps in infrastructure readiness and investment capacity remain important constraints for many operators.
Overcoming barriers to scale
Progress in Implementing the European Union Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence (Volume 2) demonstrates significant sectoral potential for AI deployment, while identifying persistent bottlenecks that continue to slow implementation. Addressing these constraints will be critical to moving from experimentation with pilots to widespread deployment that fundamentally transforms the European economy for the better. To do so, the report puts forward a number of key recommendations, including the following:
Focus on concrete sector-specific AI use cases
Targeted policies, investment, and collaboration will be essential to unlock AI’s full potential in key sectors of the EU’s economy. Public-private-academic partnerships, open innovation platforms, and cross-border collaborations can accelerate AI development and adoption, particularly when grounded in sector-specific needs. Focusing on concrete AI use cases, building ownership and trust through transparency and co-design with end-users, and demonstrating tangible benefits will be key to ensuring that AI strengthens Europe’s economic competitiveness, sustainability, and societal well-being.
Strengthen data foundations
Investing in high-quality datasets, common standards and shared governance frameworks can enable secure, privacy-preserving data sharing across borders and sectors. Improving data representativeness and reducing fragmentation will lower entry barriers and support downstream AI adoption.
Expand infrastructure and compute capacity Investments in broadband connectivity, cloud and edge computing, 5G networks and AI compute environments—including AI factories and high-performance computing centres—are essential to bridging regional gaps. Initiatives such as EuroHPC are helping ensure that economic actors, including SMEs, can access the computational resources required to train and deploy advanced AI models.
Close the skills and talent gap Unlike their larger counterparts, who tend to have more resources at their disposal, smaller firms and public organisations require access to technical expertise and sector-specific training before large-scale deployment of AI becomes feasible. European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs) are supporting this process through a “test before invest” approach that lowers adoption risks.
Enhance trust and regulatory coordination Regulatory sandboxes allow firms to test innovative AI applications under supervisory conditions, enabling regulatory learning and improving compliance readiness before market entry. Providing clearer guidance and harmonising regulatory interpretation across Member States will remain particularly important for start-ups and SMEs operating under the EU AI Act, alongside relevant existing rules such as the GDPR.
Many of the report’s findings align with the European Commission’s Apply AI Strategy, which focuses strongly on accelerating adoption and the active deployment of AI across the economy. The OECD and the European Commission will continue working together to support implementation of the Strategy and to ensure that lessons from European AI deployment experiences contribute to the broader global AI policy community.
The authors would like to thank John Leo Tarver for his contributions to this report series and blog posts.
Among the various tools available to policymakers, regulatory sandboxes have gained considerable prominence in the AI governance landscape because they enable supervised innovation testing under controlled conditions and within limited timeframes. This can help to identify risks early, foster regulatory learning and refine regulatory requirements before they are applied at scale.
As AI regulatory sandboxes expand across jurisdictions and sectors, common design principles, recurring challenges and opportunities for greater effectiveness and policy coherence are emerging. As this happens, institutional co-operation and knowledge sharing are more important for ensuring coherent and effective regulatory experimentation both nationally and across borders.
In November 2025, the OECD webinar “AI Sandboxes: Sharing knowledge for success” brought together government officials, regulators and policy experts from seven countries to discuss the design and implementation of AI regulatory sandboxes. Here are the event’s key takeaways.
What is an ‘AI regulatory sandbox’?
Although there is no universally accepted definition, a regulatory sandbox generally offers temporary regulatory flexibility or waivers, allowing innovative products, services, or business models to be tested under controlled conditions and regulatory oversight. This approach promotes responsible experimentation and innovation while protecting the public interest.
To cite a few examples, Singapore’s AI healthcare sandbox offers guidelines for synthetic data to minimise privacy risks while allowing realistic testing. In the UK and other countries, AI-powered innovations in financial services are being tested under supervision that helps to prevent consumer harms such as biased scoring and automated decision-making.
In AI, this approach aligns with the OECD AI Principles – specifically Principle 2.3, which encourages governments to promote experimentation to enable the safe testing and scaling of AI systems. Similarly, the Recommendation of the Council for Agile Regulatory Governance to Harness Innovation urges governments to facilitate greater experimentation, testing, and trialling to stimulate innovation under regulatory supervision.
AI regulatory sandboxes are valuable for testing new technologies and rules in a safe, controlled way before full rollout. They offer less benefit if risks are low or if rules are already well established, but can be useful for compliance and learning in more complex regulatory environments. Decisions to utilise sandboxes should follow clear criteria to ensure efforts are appropriately targeted. Generally, initiatives with high innovation potential, substantial risks, and opportunities for regulatory discovery and improvement (including by removing barriers to beneficial innovation) should be prioritised. Key regulators, industry actors and other relevant stakeholders should be involved in this process.
In July 2023, the OECD published the policy paper Regulatory Sandboxes in artificial intelligence. Building on lessons from fintech, the report highlights the benefits of AI sandboxes, including accelerating market entry, improving regulatory understanding, and stimulating investment. It also explains why adapting the traditional sandbox model to AI presents unique technical and governance challenges. As a cross-sectoral technology, AI covers multiple legal, ethical, and technical domains, requiring strong coordination among several regulatory authorities.
Since the paper’s release, the use of AI sandboxes has accelerated. By February 2025, the Datasphere Initiative identified over 60 sandboxes worldwide related to AI, data, and technology. Furthermore, key regulatory and policy frameworks, including the European Union’s AI Act and America’s AI Action Plan, view regulatory sandboxes as essential tools for fostering AI innovation and ensuring the safe development and adoption of AI.
Insights shared during the webinar by experts from Spain, Thailand, Luxembourg, Brazil, Korea, Israel and Singapore offer valuable lessons on how different jurisdictions design and operate AI sandboxes, highlighting what works, where challenges arise, and how approaches vary across contexts. For example, Spain provides appropriate, tailored guidance to ensure effectiveness and facilitate regulatory compliance further down the line. Brazil’s sequenced approach includes capacity-building to enable participants to contribute to effective experimentation and evaluation.
Six insights about AI regulatory sandboxes from around the globe
1. AI sandboxes are not uniform
According to the Datasphere Initiative, three primary types of sandboxes are emerging worldwide, especially within the context of AI. Regulatory sandboxes: Collaborative processes where regulators work with innovators to test innovations under regulatory supervision.
Operational sandboxes: Testing environments and infrastructure where data can be hosted and accessed in controlled conditions.
Hybrid models: Combining regulatory oversight with operational capabilities, sometimes offering infrastructure and operational spaces for testing and experimentation (e.g., “supercharged sandbox” in the UK).
These models intervene at different phases of the policy and regulatory lifecycle. Some are employed before formal regulation to identify gaps and suggest necessary updates. Others operate during the development process, supporting iterative regulatory design. Some focus on helping understand legal obligations and ensure regulatory compliance, such as under the EU AI Act. Sector-specific sandboxes are also common, with countries adopting different approaches depending on regulatory priorities and institutional settings. Across these models, regulatory waivers are frequently used to enable experimentation under regulatory supervision.
Several experimentation-related initiatives, such as regulatory testbeds, living labs, or policy prototyping, share certain features and objectives with regulatory sandboxes. What truly distinguishes sandboxes is that they are the most institutionalised form of regulatory experimentation, usually led by regulators and integrated with regulatory supervision.
2. Coordination is essential
AI does not always fit neatly within existing sectoral, jurisdictional, or administrative boundaries. Its development and deployment span multiple regulatory domains, making effective coordination crucial. Luxembourg’s approach demonstrates this well, showing that AI sandboxes are more than testing spaces—they are platforms for regulatory collaboration and coordination. Luxembourg’s model brings together 11 authorities and innovation actors to align priorities and prevent fragmentation, emphasising the need for skilled project management alongside legal and technical expertise.
Specific stakeholders within the AI ecosystem pursue different objectives: data protection authorities concentrate on privacy, cybersecurity authorities on resilience, and innovators on efficiency and speed. They also offer different kinds of expertise. Sandboxes can offer a neutral space to reconcile these priorities, fostering trust and mutual understanding. To achieve this, managing the expectations of involved parties and clearly defining the objectives of a sandbox are particularly important steps.
In Thailand, a multi-faceted approach to AI regulatory sandboxing shows how balancing safety and flexibility depends on agile cooperation between sectoral regulators and industry. This approach integrates three complementary pathways: in the short term, fostering AI deployment where existing rules already allow it; in the medium term, establishing sector-specific sandboxes to manage domain-specific risks and opportunities; and eventually, developing system-wide sandboxes, including for government use, to test cross-cutting applications. Together, these mechanisms help promote AI-driven innovation within current legal frameworks while leveraging testing and experimentation to better understand the implications of emerging AI applications. Effective coordination is essential to prevent duplication of effort, regulatory gaps or conflicting rules.
Sandboxes can also play a valuable role in involving expert and academic communities in the development of AI regulation, with countries such as Spain, Luxembourg, and Brazil benefiting from such expertise at multiple stages of sandbox design and operation.
3. From policy to practice, and back again
AI sandboxes are increasingly used to bridge the gap between regulatory frameworks and real-world implementation. For example, Spain’s regulatory sandbox pilot translates the EU AI Act’s requirements for high-risk AI applications into practical compliance steps, enabling early identification of gaps and clarifying obligations for deployers. In December 2025, the Spanish AI Supervision Agency (AESIA) published a series of introductory and technical resources, developed from insights gathered during the regulatory sandbox pilot, that demonstrate how sandboxes can support evidence-based compliance guidance. Luxembourg’s AI sandbox, in turn, acts as a coordination platform to ensure lessons learned on overlapping obligations feed into the domestic operationalisation of the EU AI Act and related future guidance.
In July 2025, Singapore launched its Global AI Assurance Sandbox, building on insights from a previous pilot phase, to create a testing environment where creators or deployers of GenAI applications can have their applications evaluated by expert technical testers. Key risk aspects examined during testing include hallucination, undesirable content, data leakage, and vulnerability to adversarial prompts, with the findings informing policy guidance. Brazil’s Regulatory Sandbox on AI and Data Protection also exemplifies this trend. It aims to promote transparency, privacy by design and responsible innovation in AI systems that handle personal data, using structured experimentation to help innovators achieve regulatory compliance and assist regulators in understanding how rules work in practice and where adjustments may be necessary.
Simultaneously, AI sandboxes continue to shape future regulatory frameworks. In Thailand, sector-specific sandboxes for digital payments, digital assets, banking and insurance are expected to help regulators understand real-world AI applications and prepare for system-wide governance. As sandboxes move regulation from theory to practice and back to policy, they create an iterative loop that can strengthen trust and adaptability in AI governance. To achieve this, sandboxes should generate insights to inform better regulation. This, in turn, requires consistent reporting, sharing of results, and the establishment of feedback loops across sectors and countries to boost compliance and policy development.
This is one example of a knowledge-sharing process in AI regulatory sandboxes.
Nevertheless, translating sandbox results into regulatory improvements remains challenging, even in countries like Korea, which has considerable experience conducting regulatory experiments across sectors.
4. Incentives matter
Participation in AI sandboxes is not automatic. Clear and well-designed incentives are essential for both innovators and regulators. Israel, for instance, has introduced a government fund that provides financial support, legal counselling and mentorship for regulators launching AI sandboxes, while also offering grants to participating firms. Similarly, Singapore reduces testing-related barriers to GenAI adoption through practical guidance and access to specialised testing partners.
These models recognise a fundamental challenge: AI experimentation is resource-intensive and needs to focus on areas where it matters most. Without targeted support, regulators may struggle to operate sandboxes, and companies might be hesitant to participate. Furthermore, when offering incentives, authorities should encourage a diverse mix of participants—small firms, big players, different sectors, and different AI applications—to ensure that sandbox insights are both representative and robust. The complex nature of regulatory sandboxes themselves may also pose challenges for some applicants or even participants. In this context, Brazil outlined a three-stage execution framework, starting with capacity building for selected participants undertaken by a partner university, before advancing to the experimentation and evaluation phases.
5. The growing need for interoperability and cross-border collaboration
As AI systems operate across borders, there is a growing need for AI sandboxes to extend beyond national borders. Without international coordination, firms may engage in ‘jurisdiction hopping’, seeking the most permissive regulatory environments. Interoperability between sandboxes is thus becoming a governance necessity. Cross-border collaboration is also crucial for international regulatory cooperation. In Brazil’s case, preparatory work to develop the sandbox included international consultations on the experimental methodology. This approach enables the benefit from international practices and standards and facilitates the sharing of experiences in later stages of the project.
Cross-border sandboxes have already proven their worth. Singapore’s Global AI Assurance Pilot, for example, involved 17 AI deployers from nine countries collaborating with 16 specialised testers from the US, UK and Europe. Use cases include summarisation, chatbots to AI applications in healthcare, finance and human resource management. These cross-border tests allowed regulators and companies to understand how AI performs in different legal, cultural and technical environments. For example, a chatbot that safely managed English queries inadvertently leaked confidential information when prompted in Mandarin, demonstrating the importance of multilingual testing.
6. AI sandboxes come with challenges of their own
AI sandboxes face several challenges. Regulators often encounter capacity limitations and lack the technical expertise or project management skills necessary to supervise complex AI systems. Fragmentation and coordination issues also arise, as AI spans multiple sectors and necessitates collaboration among numerous authorities, including across borders.
Designing suitable requirements and safeguards for sandbox frameworks can be challenging, especially when multiple regulatory regimes are involved, as demonstrated by Brazil. Deciding the appropriate level of transparency, human oversight, and data governance can be particularly difficult when firms seek waivers to speed up testing.
At the same time, Korea’s experience demonstrates that although safety and consumer protection rules are vital, excessively strict requirements may deter participation, especially among SMEs, and hinder experimentation. Safeguards should therefore be proportionate to and aligned with the risks posed by the technology, as overly complex procedures can undermine the agility required in regulatory sandboxes in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Measuring the impact of AI sandboxes is also difficult. Without clear metrics, sandboxes risk becoming isolated experiments rather than influential policy tools. Ideally, impact should be monitored across various areas, such as faster time-to-market for compliant AI systems, increased regulatory clarity and coherence (including through less fragmentation), and tangible updates to laws and standards shaped by sandbox insights.
Furthermore, as highlighted in a 2024 OECD policy paper, there are potential limitations concerning legality, feasibility, resources, and equity. Regulatory experiments should adhere to constitutional norms, including those concerning equal treatment.
A vital element for responsible innovation and public trust?
As a relatively new regulatory tool designed to address a rapidly evolving general-purpose technology, AI sandboxes raise significant questions about their role. Some of the questions raised during the online workshop include:
What role might civil society play in AI sandboxing?
How can public institutions build the expertise required to supervise regulatory sandboxes involving frontier-level AI systems?
How can sandboxes balance flexibility with protecting long-term societal values (e.g., what types of safeguards should be in place regarding regulatory exemptions)?
What measures, such as reporting and documentation requirements, talent management, and capacity building, are necessary to ensure transparency and build trust in AI regulatory sandboxes?
As AI governance develops and these questions are addressed, AI sandboxes hold the potential to become key tools for promoting responsible innovation, enhancing governance and building public trust in AI systems across the globe.
The OECD is well placed to advance these objectives by facilitating the systematic exchange of knowledge and expertise, and by developing standardised, comparable frameworks for measuring outcomes. It can also use its convening role to support alignment on guidance for the targeting, design and implementation of AI regulatory sandboxes. By grounding this work in empirical evidence and practical experience, the OECD can help strengthen the overall evidence base and inform more effective policy approaches.
The authors would like to thank Natalie Cohen, Lucia Russo, Guillermo Hernandez, Xavier Pearson, Viktor Samek and John Leo Tarver for their contributions to this piece.
Companies hoping to take advantage of AI’s opportunities need to be trustworthy. Whether investing in, developing, or using AI, the OECD’s new Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible AI provides businesses with an internationally agreed, government-backed tool to demonstrate that markets and societies can trust their AI systems.
Recent international reporting underscores a growing consensus: AI is not just a technological shift. It is a major geopolitical, economic, and societal phenomenon that demands coordinated action amongst all actors, including companies.
AI has the potential to transform society through productivity, economic value and solutions to complex challenges, but for these benefits to materialise, AI needs trust. So far, the technology seems to advance faster than its guardrails. The gap between AI systems and appropriate safeguards is now one of the defining challenges for policymakers and global businesses alike. Both are under pressure to balance AI innovation and diffusion with safety and risk management. Success depends on getting the balance right.
Risks throughout the AI value chain are continually evolving
Risks to people and the environment can manifest at any point along the AI value chain. The OECD actively tracks and categorises risks through its AI Incidents and Hazards Monitor.
Here are a few examples. At one end of the AI value chain, there are the people who label, clean, and moderate the vast datasets required to train AI models. They can face low wages, long hours, and suffer psychological distress from exposure to harmful content. Companies need to ensure decent work for data enrichment workers.
The environmental costs of running AI systems can also be significant, particularly for energy and water consumption by data centres that power AI development and deployment, which may lead to higher energy prices.
Data privacy is another critical concern. AI models are trained on massive datasets that may include personal or sensitive information. If these datasets are not properly anonymised and secured, it can lead to data breaches. If AI models “memorise” and reproduce sensitive data in their outputs, they can expose confidential details, creating legal and ethical dilemmas.
At the other end of the AI value chain, the potential for AI misuse poses risks such as reputational harm and the spread of misinformation. AI-generated deepfakes, for instance, can be used to create realistic but fabricated content, damaging reputations or manipulating public opinion. Similarly, AI can be used to generate and disseminate mis and dis-information at speed and scale, eroding trust in institutions and potentially influencing events.
Worldwide, governments, consumers, and markets are calling for responsible and trustworthy AI. This is one of the reasons for the surge in mandatory and voluntary AI risk management frameworks, responsible AI initiatives, global agreements, academic research and statements from industry leaders and investors. However, this surge in frameworks is also increasing complexity for companies, as risk management is defined differently across jurisdictions and understanding of AI-related risks is evolving.
OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible AI: A flexible, whole-of-value-chain approach to support businesses in navigating evolving risks and rules
This is why the OECD has now developed the first internationally agreed, government-backed Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible AI. Backed by all the OECD’s member countries, plus 17 partner governments and the EU, this Guidance helps enterprises navigate the complex terrain of AI risk management. It is designed to help businesses ensure that the AI systems they develop are trustworthy, used and developed safely and responsibly, and aligned with broad societal values.
A step-by-step framework for enterprises to set up internal management systems capable of proactively identifying and responding to risks related to human rights, labour standards, and environmental impacts.
Recommendations and implementation examples for everyone in the AI value chain, from data suppliers and infrastructure providers to financiers and end-users – including enterprises. The guidance emphasises a “whole-of-value-chain” approach to support secure and resilient AI value chains more resistant to supply chain shocks and interference.
A roadmap of related provisions in existing frameworks, indicating how each step complements and relates to relevant provisions from AI risk management frameworks. This feature helps enterprises understand how implementing this guidance can help them meet expectations from multiple sources and navigate the current landscape of AI risk management frameworks.
Responsibility and trust can give a competitive edge
Responsibility and innovation not only coexist but also reinforce each other. Companies that show a commitment to responsible AI and actively address potential risks can gain trust from investors, customers, regulators, and policymakers. This trust leads to a competitive edge. Instead of hindering innovation, responsible AI practices can speed up growth by reducing obstacles and preventing costly damage to reputation, legal issues, and society.
Responsible and trustworthy AI is becoming increasingly crucial for accessing global markets as international regulatory and voluntary risk management frameworks evolve. Companies in the AI value chain that meaningfully implement the Guidance’s recommendations can position themselves advantageously for cross-border expansion, potentially avoiding the substantial costs of retrofitting systems to meet various regional requirements.
As AI continues to develop rapidly, frameworks and best practices for responsible AI are likely to evolve as well. To help stakeholders keep pace, the OECD will launch an online navigation tool later this year with updates on new frameworks and use cases.
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 convenes at a moment of accelerated AI deployment. Governments and industry leaders are moving beyond experimentation toward integrating advanced AI systems across strategic sectors, consumer services and public administration. At the same time, major technology firms are advancing increasingly autonomous, task-oriented AI “agents”, thereby enriching the policy conversation and focusing it more on the technology’s real-world operationalisation.
In this context, the Summit reflects a broader global trend toward large-scale implementation. This shift aligns with ongoing OECD work on monitoring AI incidents and hazards, supporting the operationalisation of the OECD AI Principles, and measuring AI diffusion and understanding patterns of adoption.
The OECD and its Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) are engaged across the Summit’s agenda, working with India and other partners to translate years of analysis, data and policy frameworks into tools that policymakers can use in practice to have real impact.
Across the summit, the OECD will support this pragmatic approach with a series of events and deliverables. Details for the specific times and locations can be found on our main event webpage:
Advancing AI transparency in practice 17 February, 11:30 – 12:25 (IST) West Wing Room 4, Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre WATCH THE LIVE STREAM Co-hosted by the OECD, Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Infosys and Microsoft, this discussion will explore how to align national and regional policy frameworks with shared expectations for transparency, safety, and accountability. Anchored in the Hiroshima AI reporting framework for advanced AI systems, the discussion will explore how common reporting practices, risk disclosures, and transparency mechanisms can support both national policy objectives and cross-border trust. Participants will discuss how voluntary frameworks, such as international reporting templates, assurance mechanisms, public–private collaboration on testing and evaluation, can complement national policies by enabling faster learning cycles, supporting innovation, and fostering convergence where it matters most for safety and rights.
Democratising trust: Open source tooling for safe, secure and trustworthy AI 17 February, 13:30 – 14:25 (IST) Room 9, Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre WATCH THE LIVE STREAM Co-hosted by the OECD, the India AI Impact Summit, Mozilla Foundation, ROOST, the UK AI Security Institute, and Mistral AI, this panel will explore the practical landscape of open-source tooling for trustworthy AI. Our experts will: Take stock of the current open-source tooling ecosystem and highlight key gaps and challenges. Showcase open-source tools that enable both technical and non-technical stakeholders to monitor and assess AI safety, security, and trustworthiness. Examine how open-source approaches can help build capacity in underrepresented regions and communities. Present the OECD.AI Catalogue of Tools and Metrics for Trustworthy AI and launch an open call for submissions of open-source tools, inviting AI practitioners worldwide to contribute.
AI for inclusive and resilient food systems 20 February 2026, 14.30 – 15.30 (IST) Room 18, Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre WATCH THE LIVE STREAM The Government of the Netherlands and the OECD will co-host a flagship event on AI for inclusive and resilient food systems, with the participation of H.E. Mr. Harry Verweij, Ambassador at Large and Special Envoy AI for the Kingdom of the Netherlands and H.E. Mr. Nezar Patria, Vice Minister of Communications and Digital Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia, among other distinguished speakers. This session leverages the work of the India AI Impact Summit Working Group on Economic Growth and Social Good, co-chaired by the Netherlands and Indonesia. It explores how AI can support the transition to more transparent, responsible, and inclusive agricultural production and distribution within food systems. Discussions will draw on national initiatives and concrete use cases to highlight practical, scalable approaches to improving data sharing, interoperability, risk management, and access to high-quality agricultural data.
GPAI Ministerial Council Meeting EVENT CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC 20 February, 10:00 – 12:30 (IST) Summit Room, Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre The India AI Impact Summit will host the GPAI Council Meeting at Ministerial Level, bringing together ministers and senior representatives from GPAI members, partners and stakeholders.The ministerial meeting will provide a forum to advance GPAI’s mission to promote human-centric, safe, secure, and trustworthy AI, grounded in the OECD Recommendation on AI. Discussions will focus on shaping GPAI’s strategic direction and strengthening international collaboration amid rapid technological change.
People, planet and progress: India’s AI moment
Indian authorities and organisers frame the Summit around three pillars: People, Planet and Progress. The emphasis is on ensuring that accelerated adoption translates into inclusive growth, environmental sustainability and tangible public value.
A central theme is delivery. Discussions are expected to focus on how governments can move from strategy documents to implementation through institutional capacity building, interoperable data systems, procurement reform and accountability mechanisms. These priorities resonate with OECD work, highlighting the importance of governance frameworks that enable innovation while safeguarding rights and public trust.
Some potential outcomes from the India AI Summit
Against this backdrop of rapid adoption, infrastructure development and evolving governance challenges, the OECD’s contribution focuses on evidence, measurement and international co-operation. Through data, policy tools and a multi-stakeholder convening role, the OECD supports countries in translating ambition into accountable and inclusive AI deployment.
The success of the India AI Impact Summit could help governments to clarify answers to practical questions: how to deploy AI responsibly in public services, how to develop AI skills at scale, how to manage risks and incidents, and how to ensure AI contributes to sustainable development rather than undermining it.
Most importantly, it should help rebalance the global AI conversation. By placing everyday impact and responsibility at the forefront, the Summit recognises that the future of AI will be shaped not only in research labs and boardrooms, but also in classrooms, clinics, farms, and public administrations around the world.
Join us in Delhi
The OECD looks forward to working with India and international partners to make the India AI Impact Summit a milestone for global AI governance. We invite readers to visit the OECD.AI India AI Impact Summit agenda page to track all of our activities and engage with the discussions as they unfold.
Turning principles into practice is not easy. But it is essential. And in New Delhi this February, we have a real opportunity to move the global AI agenda forward together.
Artificial intelligence is changing fast, and the world is feeling both excited and uneasy about it. People use AI tools every day in hospitals, classrooms, companies and public services, yet the rules that guide these tools are still developing. Many governments are trying to find a balance between innovation and safety. Others are trying to make sure that AI actually improves people’s lives without widening gaps.
These summits did not occur in isolation but are part of broader global efforts to coordinate responsible approaches to AI. The G7 Hiroshima Process in 2023–24 established a shared commitment to trustworthy, human-centric AI, leading to the adoption of the Hiroshima Declaration, which calls for international cooperation on safety, transparency, and risk mitigation.
Building on that, the Paris AI Summit in 2025 moved the conversation toward implementation, with an early agreement on safety evaluations, incident-reporting mechanisms and commitments to support countries with limited technical capacity. The India AI Action Summit represents the next step in this progression: translating these collective principles into measurable on-the-ground outcomes.
In recent months, people have repeatedly asked me two questions. Why should India host such a major global meeting? And is this summit actually useful for India and the world?
The simple answer here is that the next phase of AI will not be decided by a small number of companies or countries. It will depend on whether billions of people, especially in the Global South, can use AI safely, affordably and accountably. India, with its linguistic diversity, strong digital public infrastructure and experience deploying technology at a population scale, is well positioned to help shape this practical phase.
However, AI comes with challenges related to privacy, digital exclusion and the balance between innovation and oversight. But these very tensions make India’s experience pertinent to other countries facing the same trade-offs.
This blog post explains why that matters, what the international community can expect in Delhi, and how we should measure progress at the end of the summit.
Why India, and why now
AI deployment in the Global South will shape global outcomes
Much of the world’s discussion on AI has focused on frontier models, international competition and long-term safety. These debates are important, but AI’s greatest impact will be felt in how it reaches ordinary people. From farmers and students to small businesses, frontline health workers and local governments.
More than half of the world’s population lives in countries categorised as the Global South — a term first popularised in the late 1960s to describe post-colonial economies, and one I don’t fully agree with, as it often flattens diverse countries into a single broad category.
If AI is to be truly global, it must work for multilingual, resource-constrained and diverse environments. This includes reliable translations, culturally grounded datasets, accessible interfaces and low-cost deployments. It also means designing systems that respect human rights and democratic norms even in places with limited regulatory capacity.
India sits at the intersection of these challenges. With over a billion people, 22 official languages and thousands of dialects, any technology deployed at scale must be inclusive by design. India’s experience offers lessons for many other countries navigating the same realities.
India has a strong track record in large-scale digital public infrastructure
India’s digital public infrastructure, or DPI, is one of the most widely referenced success stories of how technology can enable access and accountability. Systems like Aadhaar, UPI and DigiLocker have helped millions access identification, financial services and digital records. These platforms were built with interoperability and openness in mind, which has led to a wave of public and private innovations.
At the same time, these systems have also raised important questions about privacy, data security, and exclusion of marginalised communities who lack documentation or digital access. India’s ongoing work to address these concerns—through data protection legislation, improved grievance mechanisms, and efforts to reach the digitally excluded—provides practical lessons about implementation challenges that other countries will inevitably face.
The India AI Impact Summit is expected to draw on this experience, including both successes and areas for improvement. The global community is watching to see how India will frame the link between AI and digital public goods, and how these tools can be used responsibly in sectors such as education, healthcare and social protection.
International expectations are focusing on implementation leadership
The earlier global AI safety and governance summits created momentum. They helped identify risks, promote transparency and encourage cooperation. But now, many countries and organisations want clarity on what should happen next.
The India summit is an opportunity to shift the conversation from what AI might do to what it should deliver. This includes measurable improvements in public services, clearer accountability mechanisms and more inclusive access to AI tools. By focusing on implementation, India can complement the work of the OECD-GPAI, UNESCO and other international bodies.
What the India AI Impact Summit should prioritise
A conversation about measurable, real-world outcomes
The summit should begin by asking a straightforward question: What changes on the ground when AI is deployed responsibly at scale? To answer it, discussions need to move beyond broad aspirations and focus on concrete domains like public healthcare triage, classroom support tools, agricultural advisory systems, and other public-sector applications where impact can be seen and measured.
Government delegates should be encouraged to present evidence, not statements of intent. That means clear baselines, transparent evaluation methods, and metrics that reflect real improvements: higher diagnostic accuracy, increased crop yields and shorter benefit-processing times all achieved without compromising fairness or human oversight.
If the summit succeeds, it will shift the global conversation toward what works, for whom, and under what conditions.
Three ways the Global South can shape the international agenda
A meaningful summit requires a wide range of voices—especially from regions where AI deployment will shape social and economic outcomes for decades to come. Countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East bring their lived experiences of linguistic diversity, data scarcity, affordability constraints and uneven digital access.
The summit should create space for these countries to set priorities rather than simply respond to frameworks developed elsewhere. Their perspectives are vital for building governance models that reflect the realities of low-resource contexts, rather than idealised assumptions from high-income environments.
A more pluralistic conversation would reinforce a simple principle: responsible AI cannot be universal if it is not also contextual.
Rebalancing the narrative with the immediate societal, environmental and institutional challenges
One of the most important roles the summit can play is to broaden the global AI discourse. Today, existential risk narratives dominate many international forums, often overshadowing more immediate and systemic issues. The India AI Impact Summit should refocus attention on the present: AI’s energy footprint, labour displacement, rising misinformation, digital exclusion and the growing pressure on public institutions to oversee algorithmic systems they are not adequately equipped to oversee.
The environmental dimension deserves particular attention. Training and deploying large AI models require significant energy resources, disproportionately affecting the Global South. Many of these countries face climate vulnerability, fragile grids and competing development priorities. For regions already grappling with heatwaves, droughts and energy shortages, the cost of “AI at scale” cannot be separated from broader planetary concerns. If AI is to be deployed responsibly, discussions must also consider energy and natural resource efficiency and equitable access to compute.
These issues determine how people experience AI today and whether they trust it tomorrow. Giving them equal weight would help correct the imbalance in global discussions and lead to governance that addresses risks people actually face, not only those imagined at the far horizon.
Potential wins for the India AI Impact Summit
Practical pathways for responsible public-sector deployment
Across sectors, governments are eager to use AI to strengthen healthcare, expand access to education and streamline welfare delivery. Yet many lack clarity on how to procure, evaluate or oversee these systems responsibly. A meaningful outcome of the summit would be simple, actionable pathways that public agencies can adopt without specialised expertise. These might take the form of evaluation checklists with acceptable error and bias thresholds, procurement templates with human oversight requirements, or clear guidance on when and how officials should override an AI recommendation. Transparent case studies and training for civil servants would also help countries move from hesitation to informed, confident experimentation.
Strengthened mechanisms for trust and accountability
Concerns about misinformation, bias, privacy and security continue to rise, and many countries, particularly those with limited technical capacity, need practical tools to manage these risks. The summit could make a real contribution by advancing shared approaches to incident reporting, auditing and assurance, as well as safety testing methods that work across varied deployment contexts. Small pilot frameworks would help establish a common baseline of accountability. Such efforts would not only support global cooperation but also build public trust at a time when many citizens and policymakers remain uncertain about the reliability of AI systems.
Broader cooperation on multilingual and inclusive AI with robust safety infrastructure
Many countries struggle with adapting AI to their unique linguistic profiles. India’s long-standing work in language technologies positions it to convene collaborations on multilingual and inclusive AI. New partnerships on datasets, dialect-specific models, local-first interfaces and research on linguistic bias could meaningfully expand access for millions of people worldwide.
But inclusion must be matched with safeguards. As AI tools become more widely available, countries will need parallel investments in risk-assessment expertise, regional coordination on harmful content and support for the development of first-generation regulatory frameworks. Striking the right balance between openness and safety would reinforce core OECD AI Principles and help ensure expanded access does not bring greater vulnerability.
Broader implications for global AI policy
Everyday impact before frontier risks
Research on frontier AI risks must continue, but the India AI Impact Summit signals an important rebalancing of global attention, as mentioned before. It asks policymakers to look beyond hypothetical future scenarios to acknowledge how AI is already shaping critical aspects of our daily lives, from healthcare triage and classroom instruction to welfare delivery, agricultural advice and urban mobility.
For most people, the urgent question is not whether AI poses an existential threat, but whether the systems they encounter today are reliable, safe and genuinely useful. The summit’s focus on practical impact aligns global governance with lived reality.
Ensuring AI benefits for everyone
A second implication is the reaffirmation that inclusion is not a downstream concern but a prerequisite for responsible AI. Global conversations often gravitate toward powerful models built in highly resourced environments, yet billions of people rely on limited connectivity, low digital literacy and minority-language interfaces.
India’s leadership places these conditions at the centre of the global agenda. It broadens the imagination of what “good AI” must account for, reminding the world that both equitable deployment and cutting-edge capability are essential to whether AI helps or harms societies.
Building a more open and collaborative ecosystem
The summit also nudges the world toward a more open and cooperative model of AI development. Some countries can share tools, datasets, and governance mechanisms to help each other build their own capabilities rather than remain passive consumers. Openness here is not about lowering standards; it is about raising the global floor and ensuring that safety capacity grows alongside access. Many countries want to participate meaningfully in the AI economy, and the summit offers a platform to explore practical pathways for doing so.
What the world should take away from Delhi
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is more than just another international meeting because it represents a shift from abstract debates to concrete action. Its core question — how to make AI useful, safe and inclusive at scale — goes to the heart of global governance. If the summit delivers practical tools, clearer deployment pathways and stronger cross-regional collaboration, it will set a new benchmark for what international coordination on AI can achieve.
The world is watching India, not because it claims to have all the answers, but because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to turn large-scale ideas into real-world outcomes. And it has done so while openly confronting the tensions and trade-offs that accompany such efforts. In a period of rapid technological change, this experience is invaluable.
As AI evolves, the global community will increasingly need countries that can translate principles into practice at a population scale. The India AI Impact Summit is a chance to advance that work. If successful, its influence will extend far beyond India, shaping how the world understands and pursues responsible AI in the years ahead.
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