The OECD AI Policy Toolkit: Better AI policies for better lives
Artificial intelligence (AI) is both a technology story and a policy challenge. Governments across sectors and regions are grappling with the same question: how to effectively support the safe, trustworthy development and use of AI in ways that align with their countries’ needs?
Whether setting a national AI strategy or designing concrete initiatives to implement it, governments need guidance that meets them where they are. From experience, I can attest that the hardest part is rarely agreeing on principles; it is finding concrete, comparable examples of how others made them work. That is the gap the OECD AI Policy Toolkit closes.
Released yesterday by the OECD under the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), the AI Policy Toolkit is the first version of a practical, non-prescriptive guide for policymakers to translate the OECD AI Principles into action—a deliberate shift from defining what good AI policy requires to showing how to build it.
What the Toolkit does
The Toolkit is an interactive, evolving platform to support policymakers throughout the AI policy cycle. It complements OECD.AI’s broader ecosystem of tools for data, analysis and AI governance.
The Toolkit helps governments target and prioritise where to act. Through AI-powered semantic search, it surfaces relevant policy examples and guidance drawn from real-world practice, turning the OECD’s accumulated evidence into options a policymaker can use the same day—rather than a library to be read.
Built with policy-makers, not just for them
A year ago, the 2025 OECD Ministerial Council Meeting set this work in motion. What followed was less a drafting exercise than a year of listening—and the Toolkit released today reflects what countries told us they needed.
Far from being a top-down exercise, the OECD Secretariat developed the Toolkit with end-users through co-creation across regions. Targeted interviews and four co-creation workshops across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa—one of which Costa Rica was proud to host—brought policymakers, industry and experts together to shape its design around how governments actually work and make decisions.
Not only did these co-creation workshops highlight both shared challenges and region-specific priorities. They grounded the Toolkit in fundamental policy questions:
- How to navigate trade-offs between local and global AI models, or between innovation and regulation?
- How to address infrastructure gaps, such as AI compute capacity?
- How to scale AI in agriculture, education or healthcare?
Two lessons that shaped the Toolkit
Moreover, the collaborative approach to developing the Toolkit has yielded important collective lessons.
- First, context is decisive: AI policy must reflect national needs and preferences, institutional capacity and levels of digital maturity.
- Second, addressing shared global challenges such as managing risks posed by advanced AI systems or ensuring diverse linguistic and cultural representation in AI models requires international cooperation as well as tailored policy responses.
Our sincere thanks go to the governments and organisations that, alongside Costa Rica, made this possible—notably Italy, France, Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the French Development Agency and the Inter-American Development Bank—and to the policymakers and experts who contributed their time and insight. I also commend the OECD Secretariat for its sustained work.
What comes next
The OECD Ministerial Council Meeting (MCM) marks the Toolkit’s first release, which is an important milestone, but it is far from the finish line.
As AI technologies and related policy issues develop, the OECD remains dedicated to ensuring the Toolkit stays relevant through regular updates by:
- Refining and improving the Toolkit through ongoing feedback and iteration
- Incorporating more policy examples and use cases to strengthen its practical relevance via the OECD.AI Policy Navigator
- Expanding its coverage of emerging policy issues, including sector-specific guidance, infrastructure and regulatory approaches
From shared principles to shared practice
The OECD AI Policy Toolkit results from a collaborative effort to transform AI principles into implementation. By integrating OECD standards with regional insights, it guides policymakers in leveraging AI’s opportunities while responsibly and effectively managing its challenges.
The Toolkit’s success will be measured not by its launch but by the policies it helps shape. Its impact depends on sustained collaboration and support. A year from now, I expect us to point to concrete cases where this tool moved a country from principle to practice—better AI policies for better lives.
