airegulationmap.org

airegulationmap.org is an open-source interactive map of how the world regulates AI. Every country is scored from one to five across six dimensions, from the maturity of its regulation to how strictly that regulation is enforced. Clicking a country opens the detail behind the score: a written summary, the relevant laws, and links to primary sources. A timeline shows how each country’s posture has shifted over time. I built it, and I maintain it.

Why it exists

The debate about AI regulation tends to come down to four players: the US, the UK, the EU, and China. Plenty of other countries are moving too, and that work is mostly invisible if you only read the usual sources. I built the map because nothing was actually tracking the whole picture. Putting every country on the same six measures lets you compare what is really happening, rather than guessing from the few jurisdictions that dominate the conversation. Maintaining it is also how I keep my own view of the field current.

How it works

The map itself is vanilla JavaScript with D3 and TopoJSON, built deliberately without a framework, and it deploys to Cloudflare Pages. The data behind it comes from a Python pipeline that uses the Claude API to research each country’s regulation and turn it into structured scores and written summaries, each backed by source links. A GitHub Action runs the pipeline on the first of every month, re-researching the countries whose data has gone stale and committing the changes automatically, so the map stays current without manual data entry.

The hard part is reliability rather than research. Model output has to be trustworthy enough to publish unattended, so the pipeline enforces strict structured output and ties every score to a citable source, with a confidence level and a last-updated date attached. A reference that is wrong is worse than no reference, so most of the effort sits in the validation rather than the prompt.

What’s next

The map works, so the next phase is making it a research tool rather than only a reference. The features I am building towards include downloadable data, full-text search across the regulation summaries, a per-country changelog drawn from the history the pipeline already records, side-by-side comparison of countries across the six dimensions, and the ability to read a bloc like the EU or ASEAN as a single unit. Each is independent of the others, so they can ship one at a time.