Though their attempts to keep up with developments in artificial intelligence have mostly fallen short, regulators around the world are taking vastly different approaches to policing the technology. The result is a highly fragmented and confusing global regulatory landscape for a borderless technology that promises to transform job markets, contribute to the spread of disinformation or even present a risk to humanity.

The major frameworks for regulating A.I. include:

Europe’s Risk-Based Law: The European Union’s A.I. Act, which is being negotiated on Wednesday, assigns regulations proportionate to the level of risk posed by an A.I. tool. The idea is to create a sliding scale of regulations aimed at putting the heaviest restrictions on the riskiest A.I. systems. The law would categorize A.I. tools based on four designations: unacceptable, high, limited and minimal risk.

Unacceptable risks include A.I. systems that perform social scoring of individuals or real-time facial recognition in public places. They would be banned. Other tools carrying less risk, such as software that generates manipulated videos and “deepfake” images must disclose that people are seeing A.I.-generated content. Violators could be fined 6 percent of their global sales. Minimally risky systems include spam filters and A.I.-generated video games.

U.S. Voluntary Codes of Conduct: The Biden administration has given companies leeway to voluntarily police themselves for safety and security risks. In July, the White House announced that several A.I. makers, including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, had agreed to self-regulate their systems.