At the beginning of 2020, Sundar Pichai, CEO of US tech giant Alphabet, made a plea for a regulatory framework for AI. Writing in the Financial Times in January 2020, Pichai highlighted some of the amazing advances AI is bringing to the world, but also the need to be “clear-eyed about what could go wrong”. Fears around deep-fakes, misuse of facial recognition and so on have the potential to breed suspicion and mistrust, cutting off the plant before it has a chance to grow. So regulation is necessary for the safe development of AI technologies. But what Pichai was asking for were global standards, with international alignment.