Timing the Next Media Coverage Tidal Wave on AI Regulation

In the sequence before a tidal wave, all the water gets sucked back out. The phenomenon is referred to in multiple ways: "withdrawal," "negative wave," "drawdown."

Feels like that’s right about where we are right now with tech media coverage of AI Regulation.

“AI Regulation” in the last 12 months

2023 saw extremely busy news cycles for AI Regulation, punctuated by:

• The EU AI Act.

• Canada's responsible AI framework.

• Generative AI regulation complexities highlighted in Vanta State of Trust report.

• Lords committee urges caution in UK autonomous weapons use.

• Human augmentation tech prompting calls for dual-use oversight.

• Secure AI development rules being introduced.

• Deepfake scandals spurrings more call sor regulation from U.S. lawmakers to propose AI regulation, reflecting growing concerns over AI-powered misinformation and its societal impacts.

2024 has been eerily quiet, by comparison.

But what's building up on the horizon is going to be all-consuming. And there are a lot of clues in plain sight that something huge is on the horizon.

For example, of all Cybersecurity sub-themes that TechNews indexes, National Security attracted the biggest net increase in author attention in the last month:

And within that National Security security coverage, the most common co-occurring theme—Artificial Intelligence—was dragged into 33 percent of the stories:

Within all tech media coverage on Legislation, 28% mentions AI:

There are countless threads you can pull in TechNews to approximate the size and shape of the coming news moments, so your company is ready to ride that wave in your content and PR.