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REVIEW article

Front. Polit. Sci.

Sec. Politics of Technology

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1561776

This article is part of the Research Topic Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence View all articles

Frontier AI Regulation: What form should it take?

Provisionally accepted
  • University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Frontier AI systems, including large-scale machine learning models and autonomous decision-making technologies, are deployed across critical sectors such as finance, healthcare, and national security. These present new cyber-risks, including adversarial exploitation, data integrity threats, and legal ambiguities in accountability. The absence of a unified regulatory framework has led to inconsistencies in oversight, creating vulnerabilities that can be exploited at scale. By integrating perspectives from cybersecurity, legal studies, and computational risk assessment, this research evaluates regulatory strategies for addressing AI-specific threats, such as model inversion attacks, data poisoning, and adversarial manipulations that undermine system reliability. The methodology involves a comparative analysis of domestic and international AI policies, assessing their effectiveness in managing emerging threats. Additionally, the study explores the role of cryptographic techniques, such as homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, in enhancing compliance, protecting sensitive data, and ensuring algorithmic accountability. Findings indicate that current regulatory efforts are fragmented and reactive, lacking the necessary provisions to address the evolving risks associated with frontier AI. The study advocates for a structured regulatory framework that integrates security-first governance models, proactive compliance mechanisms, and coordinated global oversight to mitigate AI-driven threats. The investigation considers that we do not live in a world where most countries seem to be wishing to follow our ideals, for various reasons (competitiveness, geo-political dominations, hybrid warfare, loss of attractiveness of the European model in the Big South, etc.), and in the wake of this particular trend, this research presents a regulatory blueprint that balances technological advancement with decentralised security enforcement (i.e., blockchain).

    Keywords: Frontier AI regulation, AI security threats, adversarial risk, cryptographic governance, Compliance enforcement, legal accountability, regulatory harmonisation, algorithmic oversight

    Received: 16 Jan 2025; Accepted: 05 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Radanliev. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Petar Radanliev, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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