Whether it be the G20 Hiroshima Process, the OECD AI principles or the three global AI summits in Bletchley Park, Seoul and Paris, high-profile international collaborations on artificial intelligence (AI) safety and governance have rapidly increased in recent years. However, many of these international dialogues require selective club-based processes, leaving many Southeast Asian nations out of the picture. For instance, in the 2024 AI Seoul Summit, Singapore was the only Southeast Asian delegation in attendance, and Singapore is also the only member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) initiative, which focuses on global AI governance.
While other international summits,such as the United Nations’ AI for Good Global Summit, have seen increased attendance in recent years, the overall presence of Southeast Asian nations remains disproportionately underrepresented, especially when considering the countries’ wide usage of AI platforms and softwares.
As Brookings’ scholars Shaun Ee and Jam Kraprayoon point out, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Underrepresentation on the international stage means that Southeast Asia, and other regions alike, will be increasingly vulnerable to the risks posed by frontier AI systems such as OpenAI’s o1 reasoning models; according to the company, these new models utilize additional compute to spend more time “thinking”, enabling a greater capacity to tackle more complex tasks and problems. Reportedly, it performs near a PhD student level on challenging physics, chemistry, and biology tasks. According to Yosua Bengio, a computer science professor at the University of Montreal, this improved ability to reason can easily be misused to deceive users at a higher rate than GPT-4o. Hence, including Southeast Asia in the global dialogue for AI governance is crucial not only to the region, but also for the broader Global North, given that robust safeguard systems require diverse testing settings. Additionally, the capacity of AI system development can be expanded through transatlantic talent exchange. But what exactly does it mean to be on the menu, and what will it take to get them a proper seat at the table?
While the February Paris AI Summit discussed AI safety, threats to Southeast Asia were barely discussed, despite an alarming 82 percent increase in cybercrime throughout Southeast Asia and Singapore alone experiencing a 174 percent increase in phishing attempts between 2021 to 2022. Though broader safety concerns are often raised in these global summits, they are typically isolated from local contexts. For instance, in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, ‘scam centers’ are operating and affecting victims all across the region, but properly addressing them requires a specific understanding of the threat actors involved.. More importantly, when mitigating these threats, it is integral to note that several regions in Southeast Asia have more limited cybersecurity resources compared to North America and Europe. While Malaysia and Singapore have significantly strengthened their cybersecurity strategies over time, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines are still considered developing in terms of cyber capabilities, with many countries such as Indonesia facing limited cybersecurity funding. Although serious cyberattacks are common, the region’s cyber resilience remains relatively low.
AI infrastructure in Southeast Asia is rapidly emerging, with drastic investments from major tech corporations such as Microsoft and Nvidia into data centers and cloud services. Yet, many local startups are missing out on their own AI boom. While approximately $20 billion is being invested into the Asia-Pacific region, only $1.7 billion has been invested into Southeast Asia’s young AI firms. This disparity has raised concerns regarding the region’s ability to develop its private sector and compete with AI leaders such as China and the United States. Yet how can the region be expected to address such rapid investment flows without being provided the space to participate in cutting-edge R&D and technical standards-setting? A seat in forums such as the International Network of AI Safety Institutes may incentivize domestic AI development, and such inclusion will certainly be as beneficial to global investors as it will be to the region; providing Southeast Asia with the needed technical insight and collaborative frameworks will better strengthen the local AI sector, which in turn can mitigate geopolitical risk and offer a more robust, innovation-friendly market to the global AI ecosystem.
In order to push for a seat at the table, however, it is important to take a step back and assess why Southeast Asia is being left out to begin with.
For starters, Global AI summits typically reflect the agendas of major powers. Intensified technological rivalry between the U.S. and China has fostered a polarized environment in global AI governance, which has trickled down into the structure and makeup of international summits. For instance, the United Kingdom’s AI Safety Summit and Geneva’s AI for Good Global Summit typically consist of US-aligned countries such as the EU and South Korea, while Shanghai’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference and the BRICS Summits typically reflect China’s digital diplomacy interests such as sovereignty and state-centric regulation.
Consequently, Southeast Asia’s non-alignment stance means choosing not to fully engage in these summits to avoid signaling alignment with one bloc over another. By design, many global partnership initiatives are also inaccessible to the region. For instance, The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) strives for broad international participation, but its only Southeast Asian member is Singapore. GPAI and summits such as the Bletchley Park and AI Seoul Summits uphold a restrictive membership process and are invitation-only, typically limited to countries with advanced AI R&D capacity. However, most Southeast Asian countries currently allocate less than 1% of their GDP into R&D, leading to talent shortages as capable professionals often end up moving abroad for better opportunities. These compounding factors contribute to the region’s lack of influence in AI ethics and policy circles, which serves as a core prerequisite for an invitation.
Given these challenges, what will it take for Southeast Asia to get a seat at the table and enter the space of these ‘global’ summits?
ASEAN as a whole must work towards a unified AI development and cooperation framework. The status quo of fragmented approaches to AI governance make it difficult for coordinated advancements and regulations. For starters, the most tangible regional action lies in the publication of the ASEAN Guide to AI Governance and Ethics 2024, which offers recommendations for government and non-government usage of AI in the region. However, this document is non-binding and thus unable to impose sanctions if different paths were to be adopted by member states. This visibly translates in the diversity of AI-readiness in the region, measured through pillars such as Government, Technology Sector, and Data & Infrastructure. As of 2022, while Singapore and Malaysia respectively scored 84.1 and 67.4, other countries like Laos and Cambodia scored 31.7 and 31.2. Meanwhile, ASEAN’s commitment to avoid being a rule-taker means continued exclusion in major policy dialogue spaces; the region must find ways to maintain its non-alignment approach without sacrificing representation in the most pivotal AI governance spaces.
It is equally important that global powers recognize the urgency of the region’s inclusion. Collaboration with Southeast Asia is pivotal to strengthening global AI governance structure. The region’s linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic diversity provides unique datasets that can improve AI models’ adaptability and performance. For instance, projects like SEA-LION are building natural language processing tools for Southeast Asian languages, which may enhance AI applications in multilingual contexts. Further, the region’s rapidly growing digital economy and tech-savvy population presents great potential for AI-driven economic growth—one that remains largely underutilized; in fact, Southeast Asia’s internet economy is expected to reach $330 billion by 2025. Through increased collaboration, global powers may better engage with emerging markets and foster innovation—presenting significant opportunities for global AI companies to scale and localize their services in a rapidly-growing environment increasingly pivotal to global supply chains and data flows.
Simultaneously, it is just as crucial for local governments to increase investment in their AI R&D budgets. In Indonesia, the National Research and Innovation Agency has collaborated with international NGOs and startups to leverage AI for predicting volcanic eruptions and flash floods in disaster-prone areas, which has reduced disaster response times by over 30%. In Vietnam, tech companies VinAI & VinBrain are investing millions in foundational AI research for products in healthcare, mobility and natural language processing. The company has developed DrAid, an AI-powered diagnostic platform to detect respiratory diseases, reducing diagnostic time by over 50% during the pandemic. If current investment trends continue, AI could add $79.3 billion annually to the country’s GDP by 2030.
It is apparent that when more investments are poured into R&D, the results speak for themselves. It is also apparent that strides in the right direction are being made. And yet, the region still has much work to do in investing into R&D and developing robust regulatory frameworks to truly utilize its potential in the AI frontier, given that many of these countries are still left behind within the Government AI Readiness Index, with Indonesia being ranked 42nd, Vietnam being ranked 59th and others such as Laos and Cambodia ranked even lower.
The table is set, the stakes are high, and yet, the chairs remain unevenly distributed. Whether it’s the G20 Hiroshima Process, Bletchley Park, Paris, or Seoul, the world’s most influential summits continue championing global cooperation while their guest lists suggest otherwise. While much work is to be done internally, we cannot undermine the role of geopolitical interests and inaccessible systems towards Southeast Asia’s absence in these crucial rooms. More so, the region cannot be expected to play catch up when it continues to be systematically excluded. At the end of the day, if Southeast Asia continues to be left out of the conversation, the world will miss out on the opportunity to empower local solutions, diversify the AI ecosystem and create unique opportunities for market growth and collaborative innovation; if it continues to be left out, global AI governance will miss a perspective the world cannot afford to lose, one that makes global governance a reality rather than a mere slogan.