First Mover Disadvantage: Why the Isle of Man Might Be the Most Important AI Governance Experiment You’re Not Watching
The Isle of Man signed an MOU with AI Singapore in March 2024, committed £1 million to set up a dedicated office to AI, then launched the National AI Office in January 2026. Now more than one member of the Manx parliament is questioning how the money is being spent.
This country is often the least well known British Crown Dependency, with a population of 85,000 and a physical island the size of Singapore. It offers a beautiful UNESCO recognised biosphere, rolling hills of farmland, a low tax environment, plenty of strong wind, and a community willing to pour resources to educate its population (and to find ways to entice the young to return).
For a small jurisdiction, the question is not “can we keep up with AI?” but “can we build something specific and useful faster than the big states can build something comprehensive and slow?” and “how do we equip the population when technology is changing the world so rapidly?”
I’m starting this substack to keep track of the AI experiment in this small jurisdiction, and to scan the horizon of how it compares to others. 2026 will be a pivotal year. As someone who came to this island with fresh eyes and was invited to the table, I decided my contribution will be my perspective, of learning about the Isle of Man while drawing on what I’ve experienced elsewhere.
It is fair to say the Isle of Man is not reaching for first mover advantage with AI. If our advantage is not speed, could we at least be interesting and insightful with how we handle it?
In my view, the Isle of Man has an infrastructure gap it needs to plug before any kind of serious AI development.
As I have been expressing my surprise since I started working in this jurisdiction, the Isle of Man needs to make its laws more accessible. It is one of the few common law jurisdictions that do not publish their judgments on the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) network. It does not yet have its body of case authorities and legislation reliably accessible online in a searchable format. The government websites have a script banning bots, search engines and AI from indexing and reading their contents. Some secondary legislation, such as the Civil Service Regulations, does not have an official full body of text available1.
There is no way to tell how many investors and potential businesses have been put off by this lack of publicly accessible information, or have simply skipped over this jurisdiction because things are much clearer online for other countries. These are the digital foundations for building a functional regulatory environment. Companies need to be able to access and evaluate the legal landscape. This is true even if you’re not talking about AI, but even more so when a company is evaluating whether to deploy AI from the Isle of Man. Without that, any regulatory certainty advantage evaporates.
This is a credibility issue. You cannot credibly govern AI if your own laws are not accessible. This is not a criticism, but a sequencing issue. You need to build the foundation before the tower. Without the foundations solidly prepared, any rushed move will show up as first mover disadvantage instead.
It’s been two months since the establishment of the National AI Office. If small democratic jurisdictions can build credible AI governance, they create options. If they can’t, the conversation defaults to the giant players. But the Isle of Man will not do AI like the US, China, or Singapore. It’s a completely different regulatory environment. I’ll try to explain how and why, and share my observations from watching AI and the law, in writing here. With some luck, I also hope to improve my writing skills for non-legal drafting. I’ll post every fortnight. Thanks for your time.
The librarians at the Tynwald Library have helpfully directed me to the unofficial copy available at the Government Office of Human Resources website when I searched for it. See https://hr.gov.im/terms-conditions-for-employees/civil-service-regulations/