Around the world, AI systems are being deployed at scale with remarkably little institutional oversight. There is no AI safety board. The US Federal Trade Commission has jurisdiction over unfair practices but limited authority over algorithmic design. The National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes guidance that most companies ignore. The EU AI Act is partially in force but addresses only a sliver of the deployment surface.
This regulatory landscape summary is unusually blunt for MIT Technology Review: four specific institutions listed, four specific ways each falls short. The cumulative picture is that the entire institutional stack — domestic regulators, international standards bodies, supranational legislation — is structurally inadequate to the speed and scope of AI deployment. This is the governance gap that makes the shareholder argument necessary.