CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Tripathi, Gyan Prakash |
|---|---|
| Title | Geopolitics of AI Standardisation and its Impact on Fundamental Rights |
| Summary | Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a transformative and disruptive force that reshapes consumer behaviour, economic paradigms, power politics, and security logics in equal measure. Because algorithmic architectures, training data, and optimisation parameters embody the social and, therefore, political visions of those who design, develop and deploy them, AI is far from neutral. It confers decisive economic, military and ideological advantages, and states now treat the technical specification of AI systems as a strategic domain. Echoing earlier struggles over Internet protocols, governments deploy international standard-setting bodies as instruments of geopolitical influence, hoping to entrench their normative preferences in the very “bare bones” of AI. This thesis examines how the United States, the European Union, and China - alongside large middle powers viz., India, Australia, and South Korea - contest, negotiate, and diffuse AI standards within standard-setting organisations. I have synthesised realist, liberal-institutionalist and constructivist insights into a competitive norm-diffusion model, to reveal a sovereignty 013;interoperab ility paradox where states seek digital sovereignty even as global interoperability demands shared baselines. Democratic coalitions have embedded fundamental rights language in most new standards, yet authoritarian-leaning proposals persist in surveillance-heavy domains, sowing the seeds of a potential dual-centric bifurcation. Therefore, I conclude that AI standardisation now functions as a non-conventional but potent vector of geopolitical power. Keywords: artificial intelligence, standardisation, norm-diffusion, fundamental rights, geopolitics. |
| Supervisor | Ashraf, Cameran Hooshang, Ph.D. |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/tripathi_gyan.pdf |
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