Governance Temporal Lag
Does governance respond after incidents spike, or does it anticipate risks before they materialize? This chart overlays reported incidents (bars) and governance document adoptions (line) over time from 2015–2025.
How to read this
Both series are normalized to share of total (%) so you can compare proportional trends directly. Amber bars show each year’s share of all reported incidents. The teal line shows each year’s share of governance documents formally adopted — enacted, published, or officially released (not merely proposed). Toggle Coverage Score to weight documents by coverage quality instead of raw count. When bars rise faster than the line, governance is lagging behind real-world harm.
Key Takeaways
- 1.Average governance lag: 2.8 years — governance adoption typically follows incident spikes by about 2.8 years.
- 2.Slowest governance response: 6.4 Competitive dynamics with a 9.5-year lag between median incident and median governance adoption.
- 3.Governance anticipated incidents for 4.3 Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation — governance preceded incidents by 1.0 years.
- 4.2020–2025 vs 2015–2019: incidents grew 441%, governance grew 4204%. Governance is accelerating faster than incidents.
Incidents sourced from the AI Incident Database (by reported date). Governance documents from the AI governance corpus (by official adoption date — the date a document was enacted, published, or entered into force). 2015–2025 range.