Balancing Innovation and Harmony: A Daoist Approach to Artificial Intelligence Law

Abstract

Contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) governance is dominated by two regulatory postures: the European Union's precautionary, risk-tiered rulebook and the more permissive, innovation-first posture associated with the United States. Both largely treat law as an external wall built to contain a technology assumed to be inherently unruly. This paper asks what classical Daoist philosophy, and in particular the concepts of wu wei (non-coercive action), ziran (spontaneous naturalness), and the dynamic complementarity of yin and yang, might offer as a corrective to that assumption. Drawing on the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and recent scholarship on Daoism and technology, the paper develops a reading of regulation as a channel that guides a technology's own tendencies rather than a barrier erected against them. It then examines China's AI governance regime as a partial and genuinely contested illustration of harmony-oriented rhetoric operating alongside far less Daoist mechanisms of state control, before turning to the central objections against importing a two-thousand-year-old philosophical tradition into contemporary legal design: the risk of romanticizing an essentialized 'East,' and the risk that a language of harmony can be made to justify opacity rather than restraint. The paper concludes that Daoist thought is most useful not as a ready-made regulatory template but as a disposition -- a standing reminder that adaptive humility, rather than exhaustive control, may be the more durable foundation for governing a technology whose trajectory no single actor, East or West, can fully foresee.