Prediction 2 Revisited: I Said the US Would Copy Europe on AI Rules and Asia Would Sprint. The Map Redrew Itself
In January 2025 I predicted a regulatory patchwork: the US lagging and taking cues from Europe, Europe’s own bureaucracy strangling its on-the-ground rollout, and Asia fast-tracking through sandboxes.
I’m going to give myself a qualified win here, and then tell you the part I missed.
My second prediction was about regulatory divergence. Three claims: the US lags and takes cues from Europe; Europe’s bureaucratic drag slows actual deployment despite leading on the paperwork; and parts of Asia — China, Singapore — fast-track via flexible regulatory sandboxes. My favorite spin-off concept was ‘Regtech Hopping’: AI that automates jurisdictional optimization, spinning up entities wherever the rules are friendliest.
Where I nailed it
Europe’s bureaucratic drag is now the textbook case. The EU AI Act’s obligations for general-purpose AI models kicked in on August 2, 2025, with the threat of fines up to €35 million or 7% of global turnover. And what happened? Exactly what I said would happen: the rules arrived before the clarity. Companies spent 2025 in compliance limbo, building different versions of systems for different markets, waiting on codes of practice and guidance that trickled out late. Leading on regulation, lagging on deployment. That was the prediction. That was the outcome.
Asia’s fast-track also held. Singapore kept its sandbox-first posture. China kept shipping — its open-source model ecosystem exploded past Western download volumes, with Alibaba’s Qwen alone crossing 700M+ downloads, precisely because its deployment environment rewarded speed over ceremony.
Where the map redrew itself on me
Here’s what I got wrong: I assumed the US would keep taking cues from Europe. It didn’t. It went the other direction — hard.
Instead of importing Brussels-style precaution, the US pivoted to an aggressively pro-deployment, pro-build posture. Federal AI policy reoriented around speed, national-security primacy, and infrastructure. The FDA, in a move I’ll cover in prediction 13, started relaxing premarket requirements for AI clinical tools rather than tightening them. The ‘US follows Europe’ framing was wrong. The actual 2025-2026 story is the US explicitly rejecting the European model and betting that whoever deploys fastest wins.
So my directional claim — divergence, patchwork, friction at the borders — was right. My specific vector for the US was wrong. I had the US as a follower. It became a defector.
Regtech Hopping: more real than I expected, and more dangerous
My ‘Regtech Hopping’ concept — AI automating the setup of legal entities across jurisdictions to optimize for the friendliest rules — turned out to be directionally prophetic in an ugly way. The proliferation of solo, AI-run companies (see prediction 1) created exactly the jurisdiction-shopping pressure I described. When one founder can spin up operations anywhere, the regulatory arbitrage I flagged stops being theoretical.
The dark version I warned about — gambling, betting, crypto operators using the same automation to stay one step ahead of regulators — is now a live enforcement problem across multiple jurisdictions. I called it a ‘high-stakes cat-and-mouse game.’ The cat is losing.
The next 12 months: enforcement theater meets the build-fast doctrine
My forecast for May 2027: the EU AI Act delivers its first headline enforcement action against a major model provider — and it backfires politically. Expect the fine to become a rallying cry for European competitiveness hawks who argue Brussels is regulating an industry it doesn’t have. The gap between European AI rule-making and European AI building will become the defining tension of the continent’s tech policy.
The US holds its build-fast line through the 2026 election cycle, because the infrastructure spend is now too economically load-bearing to slow down. You don’t tap the brakes on $400B+ of annual capex when it’s propping up GDP growth.
And watch the third bloc harden: the open-weight world. China’s open-source dominance plus the EU’s regulatory weight plus the US’s deployment speed creates three incompatible operating environments. The winners will be the ‘bridge builders’ I named in January 2025 — the compliance-as-a-service and cross-border translation firms that help companies operate across all three without getting fined into oblivion in any of them.
I predicted a patchwork. We got a patchwork. I just had one of the three patches sewn on backwards.
Sources: original forecast (Jan 6 2025); EU AI Act GPAI obligations effective Aug 2 2025; MIT Technology Review on Chinese open-source models (Feb 2026); FDA clinical-decision-support guidance (Jan 6 2026); Manatt Health AI Policy Tracker (Apr 2026).