Vivian Balakrishnan on the need for a new regulatory paradigm for AI

Speaking at a UN General Assembly side event in New York, Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan calls AI's potential gains in health, food security and climate transformative — but says the old playbook of regulation, cooperation and legislation is not enough given the matching risks.

He argues impact lands unevenly across countries and societies, and the response needs to be both regional and multilateral. He cites Singapore's 2019 Model AI Governance Framework as part of that work and stresses that trust, transparency and privacy need joint engagement from governments, industry and civil society.

Caption language: en · Fetched: 2026-05-02

a call to break new ground in artificial intelligence as the world tries to strike a balance between embracing and regulating AI Singapore's foreign affairs minister says the benefits of AI can be transformative for sectors like Health Food security and climate change but the old ways of Regulation cooperation and legislation won't suffice as the technology also comes with great risks that impact both in terms of opportunities and risk actually have asymmetrical effects on different countries and different societies and the question is how ready are we when we face this tsunami of impacts both positive and negative and we believe that we need Regional and we need multilateral Global approaches and speaking at an aside event of the U.

N general assembly in New York Dr balakrishnan also says there is a need to put in the right safeguards to ensure transparency and privacy it points to the model AI governance framework which Singapore introduced in 2019 as part of this approach he notes that fostering trust and confidence will mean taking into account diverse viewpoints which will require engagements involving governments industry and Civil Society