Parliamentary discourse and legislative approaches to artificial intelligence regulation: a comparative analysis of five jurisdictions

Abstract

This article examines how parliamentary discourse on artificial intelligence is transformed into legal and regulatory frameworks across different political contexts. It focuses on five jurisdictions—the European Union, the United States, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and the United Kingdom—where recent AI-related legislative and parliamentary developments provide a comparative basis for analysis. The study applies a hybrid qualitative design combining a structured comparative review of academic literature, legal acts, and policy documents with a pilot critical discourse analysis of five selected parliamentary episodes from 2023 to 2026. The analysis is based on securitization theory and the concept of digital sovereignty as a discursive project. The study identifies distinct semantic cores in each jurisdiction: “risk–fundamental rights” in the European Union, “barriers–dominance” in the United States, “inequality–high risk” in Brazil, “national code–partnership sovereignty” in Kazakhstan, and “dependency lock-in–delayed reflection” in the United Kingdom. The findings show that H2 and H3 are supported, while H1 is not confirmed in its original formulation and requires revision. The article contributes to AI governance studies by proposing an updated five-part typology of AI regulation. It introduces the concept of “sovereignty through partnership” as an alternative to technological autarky and one-sided regulatory borrowing, and conceptualizes “delayed reflection” as a regulatory pattern among established democracies that recognize infrastructural dependency only after it has already emerged.