A Systematic Assessment of National Artificial Intelligence Policies: Perspectives from the Nordics and Beyond

Echoing the evolving interest and impact of artificial intelligence on society, governments are increasingly looking for ways to strategically position themselves as both innovators and regulators in this new domain. One of the most explicit and accessible ways in which governments outline these plans is through national strategy and policy documents. We follow a systematic search strategy to identify national AI policy documents across twenty-five countries. Through an analysis of these documents, including topic modelling, clustering, and reverse topic-search, we provide an overview of the topics discussed in national AI policies and contrast the differences between countries. Furthermore, we analyse the frequency of eleven ethical principles across our corpus. Our paper outlines implications of the differences between geographical and cultural clusters in relation to the future development of artificial intelligence applications.