Policy Convergence and Divergence Across National and Within Regional AI Strategies: A Policy Design Element Analysis

Governments worldwide have responded to the rapid expansion of AI by publishing national and regional AI strategies. Comparing national and regional AI strategies to identify their convergences and divergences can uncover their common practices, understand regional variations, and provide policy designers a comprehensive set of policy design elements for their ongoing AI strategy developments. Yet, existing work has not examined their underlying policy design elements or assessed whether those elements are horizontally (country-to-country) or vertical (region-to-country) converging or diverging over time. This paper addresses that gap by coding and analyzing 74 national and 3 regional AI strategies drawn from a global scan of all 205 UN member and non-member states. The coding used a latent-inductive approach organized around three functional policy design elements: goals, approaches, and principles. Two research questions guided the analysis: to what degree are national AI strategies becoming horizontally convergent or divergent over time; and to what degree are national strategies becoming vertically convergent or divergent with those countries' regional AI strategy. Results indicate strong horizontal convergence around economic competitiveness, research support, and ethical AI use, alongside persistent divergence in human rights goals, participatory governance approaches, and human-centric principles. Across the three regions, the AU exhibits the highest vertical convergence, the EU demonstrated strong alignment on regulatory and economic priorities but diverges on human-centric values, and the Nordic-Baltic Region displays mixed vertical convergence. These findings offer policy designers a comprehensive evidence base for identifying emerging AI policy design choice norms as AI strategies are developed and updated.