Central Asian Countries Discuss Common Digital Economy and AI Rules - The Astana Times

How refreshing: a region looks at artificial intelligence and reaches not for a ban, not for a levy, not for a regulator with teeth, but for the two documents every summit produces — a draft agreement and a draft code of ethics. The Astana Times reports that Central Asian states met to discuss common digital economy and AI rules. On the table: an Agreement on Cooperation among Central Asian States in Digital Policy and Artificial Intelligence Governance, plus a Code of Ethics for the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in Central Asia. Both are drafts, both were discussed, and neither is, as yet, anything.

The agreement's headline virtue is what it declines to do. It "does not call for identical digital legislation or a supranational regulator" — which is to say, it does not call for the two things that would give it force. What it does call for is maintaining national legislation and digital sovereignty while "gradually making legal and digital systems compatible." Gradually — the word doing the work of a decade, possibly three. Sovereignty, meanwhile, is a lovely thing to keep when the model weights, the chips and the training runs all sit somewhere else and the terms of service are drafted in a jurisdiction nobody at the table controls.

And then the Code of Ethics, the conference tote bag of AI governance: everyone takes one home, nobody reads it. "Responsible use" is the phrase you deploy when nothing measurable has been agreed; the excerpt offers no thresholds, no audits, no red lines and no penalties. Its own framing is honest about the ambition — compatible systems, eventually, at whatever pace suits the slowest party in the room. Meanwhile the capability curve does not do gradual. It does quarterly. One suspects the ethics code will be fully aligned long before any legislation is.