The same AI agent deployed across US, EU, and China now faces four mutually contradictory legal obligations — FTC demands unaltered outputs, Colorado requires output modification for adverse-decision disclosure, China mandates algorithm registration with human-control boundaries, and EU requires transparency labeling. ByteDance and Alibaba chose feature shutdown over rebuild because compliance architecture was fundamentally incompatible, signaling real compliance cost that Western coverage underweights. ISO 42001 covers ~70% of EU AI Act high-risk documentation but cannot resolve the cross-jurisdictional conflict.
