The Inevitability of Global Regulatory Convergence in Frontier AI Models: The "Brussels Effect" and the Structural Limits of Industry Self-Regulation

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English Abstract As frontier artificial intelligence (AI) systems advance rapidly, debate surrounding AI governance and safety standards has intensified globally. In late 2026, leading US AI laboratories—Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic—reportedly initiated plans to establish a self-regulatory organization (tentatively named the Standards Authority for Frontier AI: SAFA) to create industry-led pre-deployment evaluation and security incident reporting protocols. However, this paper demonstrates that such industry self-regulation cannot function as an independent global standard when confronted with the mandatory legal framework of the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689). Applying the analytical framework of the "Brussels Effect" alongside the economic and software engineering principles of frontier model development, this study argues that the architectural indivisibility of base model weights and the enormous fixed capital expenditure required for pre-training make geographical model bifurcation economically unfeasible. Consequently, multinational developers must design their single global frontier models to satisfy the world's most stringent legal threshold—the EU AI Act's systemic risk obligations. The paper also examines the counter-strategies of open-weight advocates (Meta), compute infrastructure providers (NVIDIA), and rival platforms (xAI / Elon Musk), concluding that global frontier AI governance will irreversibly converge toward European statutory standards rather than voluntary industry pacts. 【日本語要旨】 フロンティア人工知能(Frontier AI)の急速な発展に伴い、安全基準とガバナンス体制を巡る議論が世界規模で激化している。米AI大手3社(Google、OpenAI、Anthropic)が独自の自主規制組織(仮称:SAFA)の新設を模索する一方、欧州連合(EU)は強力な罰則を伴う「EU AI法」を先行して施行した。本稿は、「ブラッセル効果」の理論的枠組みとフロンティアモデル開発における固定費構造・アーキテクチャ的不可分性の観点から分析を行い、単一モデルをグローバル展開する経済合理性がある以上、多国籍企業は必然的に最も厳格なEU法基準(システミックリスク評価、事前監査、インシデント報告義務等)を実質的な世界共通基準として採用せざるを得ない構造を論証する。また、Meta、NVIDIA、xAI(イーロン・マスク氏)などの対抗的アクターの限界と、グローバルな規制収斂の不可避性を解明する。