Governing The AI Boom and Bridging the Technology Governance Gap in Southeast Asia: Debating an AI Framework at the Subregional Level

Abstract

Southeast Asia has become one of the most important sites of artificial intelligence expansion in the Global South. Its location beside East Asia’s technology-production networks, its deepening integration with global cloud and semiconductor firms, and its rapidly growing data-centre markets have placed the region at the centre of the contemporary AI infrastructure boom. Yet the governance architecture meant to regulate this expansion remains fragmented, advisory, and weakly enforceable. ASEAN’s 2024 Guide on AI Governance and Ethics provides useful principles, but it does not impose binding obligations, sanctions, or regional enforcement mechanisms. This paper examines the gap between Southeast Asia’s accelerating AI adoption and its limited regulatory capacity. It argues that a full European Union-style AI Act is institutionally unrealistic for ASEAN because of the bloc’s non-interference norm, uneven regulatory capacity, and political diversity. However, the absence of ASEAN-wide hard law does not imply regulatory paralysis. A sub-regional coalition of willing and capable states, especially Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, could establish enforceable minimum standards for high-risk AI systems, incident reporting, data-centre operators, and AI auditing. Vietnam’s 2025 AI legislation provides an important regional proof of concept: Southeast Asian states can move beyond soft law where political will and administrative capacity converge. The paper concludes that Southeast Asia’s AI governance future is unlikely to emerge from ASEAN consensus alone, but from layered, sub-regional, and operator-focused regulation that gradually creates a de facto regional floor.

Keyword: Artificial Intelligence; AI governance; ASEAN; Southeast Asia; Digital Regulation; Algorithmic Accountability; Cyber Fraud; Surveillance; Vietnam AI law