Bradford — Digital Empires

Status

Stub via synthesis. This page captures Bradford’s contribution as braided into geopolitics-global-ai-divide. The primary text (Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology, Oxford, 2023, plus the Tech Policy Press interview) has not yet been ingested directly.

Who

Anu Bradford. Columbia Law School. Coined the Brussels Effect; later extended it into the digital empires framing.

Central contribution

The world is governed by three competing digital-empire models, each exporting a different form of power:

• US — market-driven, exports private corporate power.
• China — state-driven, exports infrastructure power (Digital Silk Road).
• EU — rights-driven, exports regulatory power (Brussels Effect).

See digital-empires-tripartite for the full unpacking.

Bradford’s diagnosis of Europe

Europe’s tech lag is not caused by regulation. The deeper structural deficits:

• No truly integrated digital single market.
• No capital markets union; venture capital ecosystem orders of magnitude smaller than the US.
• Cultural attitudes toward risk and failure that suppress founder formation.

This is the strongest available counter to “the AI Act killed European AI” narratives. Regulation is a symptom of a deeper deficit, not its primary cause — though see brussels-effect-and-mirage for evidence that, in the short term, the AI Act now compounds the deficit.

Why this source matters for the paper

• Provides the master frame for Section 5 (Geographic Split) of 03_structure.
• Honest about EU constraints, which the paper’s brief explicitly demands.
• The “exports different forms of power” lens connects governance to value-stack shape (divergent-value-stack-optima).

To verify on primary read

• Bradford’s precise definition of the Brussels Effect (does she distinguish de jure and de facto, or is that distinction the LSE Mirage paper’s addition?).
• Whether she anticipated the Brussels Mirage failure mode for high-risk, state-controlled domains, or is broadly optimistic about regulatory export.
• Where she stands on Sovereign AI (sovereign-ai) as a complement to regulatory imperialism.

Related

• digital-empires-tripartite — the concept page.
• brussels-effect-and-mirage — where Bradford’s optimism is pressure-tested.
• geopolitics-global-ai-divide — the synthesis that braids her into the broader story.
• wef-ai-in-action-2025 — universalist consultancy frame that treats AI as globally homogeneous; Bradford’s tripartite model is exactly the structural cross-cut WEF omits.
• oecd-sme-ai-adoption-2025 — OECD G7 source: convergent operational instruments across “empires” complicate the tripartite frame.
• g7-sme-ai-policy-pluralism — four operationally distinct G7 SME-AI optima; Japan/UK as a fourth model not captured by the tripartite.