The EU AI Act is no longer the only comprehensive national AI law. On 22 January 2026 South Korea’s AI Basic Act took full effect, becoming the first such law anywhere to be operational. Japan took the opposite path: its AI Promotion Act, fully in force since September 2025, is deliberately promotion-first with no penalties, and its first national AI Basic Plan was adopted by Cabinet in December 2025. Together they mark the two poles that every other country’s AI policy now sits between.

What happened

South Korea. The Framework Act on the Development of AI and Establishment of Trust, known as the AI Basic Act, entered into force on 22 January 2026, with its enforcement decree approved by Cabinet two days earlier. It resembles the EU model: heavier obligations attach to “high-impact” and high-compute systems (with a threshold set around cumulative training compute of 10^26 floating-point operations), generative-AI outputs must carry a visible label or watermark, and the law applies extraterritorially to providers serving Korean users. A grace period of at least a year defers administrative fines except for serious harm.

Japan. The AI Promotion Act (Act No. 53 of 2025) reached full enforcement on 1 September 2025 and is innovation-first: it sets up an AI Strategy Headquarters chaired by the Prime Minister but imposes no monetary penalties, relying on existing sectoral law and soft guidance. Japan’s first AI Basic Plan was decided by Cabinet on 23 December 2025. Australia moved in the same light-touch direction, launching a National AI Plan in December 2025 and declining, for now, to proceed with the EU-style mandatory guardrails it had earlier consulted on.

Why it matters for builders

If you ship AI internationally, “comply with the EU AI Act” is no longer enough. South Korea now imposes its own transparency and high-impact obligations, extraterritorially, on a similar shape to the EU but with different thresholds and timing. Japan and Australia, by contrast, impose little binding obligation, betting on adoption over restriction.

The practical consequence is that your obligations depend heavily on which markets you serve. A generative feature shipped to Korean users needs a compliant label; the same feature in Japan faces mainly existing sectoral law. Map your target markets to their regimes early, and build to the strictest one you touch. This wiki’s regulatory compliance checklist is a starting point, and the EU AI Act coverage and the US preemption fight complete the picture of a fragmenting global landscape.

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Further reading