The Asia-Pacific region does not yet have a specific act regulating AI, and global discourse revolves around activity in the US, EU and China more generally. But Asia's privacy regulators are addressing AI on-the-ground. This session will review activity taken by privacy regulators in South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong to address AI harms. We identify best-practices and recommend policies that should be promoted around the Asia-Pacific region and the globe, in particular to regions in the Global South with less traditions of strong privacy regimes. These recommendations should help countries leap frog on AI regulation - and prevent a digital divide in AI governance. For further reading on how Asia's privacy regulators are using policy levers to take power in the AI policy debate, please see the article Asia’s Privacy Regulators Shape AI Policy On The Ground. We will focus on how liability in privacy law is holding the AI industry accountable at early stages of development, in particular in smaller states and in the Global Majority. We will share efforts to check the power of AI tools, prevent and address AI harms, with civil society efforts, such as Digital Governance Asia's AI Harm Remedy Network and AI Harm Remedy Tracker, which includes documentation of privacy violations by AI services in the Asia-Pacific region. Additionally, we highlight efforts to monitor how AI policy is developing across other legal issue area domains such as trust/safety, intellectual property, healthcare and finance in Global Majority countries in Asia through the Asia AI Policy Monitor newsletter, in order to better pluralize and democratize the global AI policy discussion away from a few large countries/jurisdictions.
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