On Sunday, October 18, IT Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja left for South Korea to attend the Global AI and Digital Summit 2026. Her agenda has a headline item: Pakistan is set to become the first country in the world to sign the Digital and AI Compact. She will present Pakistan’s future roadmap at a dedicated session and hold bilateral talks with a vice president of Google and a vice president of the World Bank.
It is a genuine diplomatic first. But it raises a question worth asking honestly: what does a country commit to when it signs a global AI agreement before it has written its own AI law?
What the Compact is, and what it is not
The official announcement says the minister’s visit centres on Pakistan’s priorities in artificial intelligence and digital inclusion. The dedicated Compact session will outline the country’s approach to digital transformation, and she will join sessions on equitable access to the internet and digital services worldwide.
One caveat is needed: officials have not specified the compact’s terms, the signing date, or what commitments Pakistan would make, and no outcomes from the scheduled meetings have been reported yet. Treat this as the start of a process, not a finished deal: a signature sets a direction, but the details will decide whether anything changes at home.
The gap nobody is hiding: no AI-specific law yet
This is the striking part of the story, and it comes from the government’s own account. There is currently no dedicated regulatory structure specifically for artificial intelligence in Pakistan. Instead, the ministry points to existing measures: the National Cyber Security Policy 2021, the Pakistan Cloud First Policy 2022, the CERT Rules 2023, and sector-specific rules such as the Critical Telecom Data and Infrastructure Security Regulations.
Critics see the same gap from the outside. Pakistan’s Personal Data Protection Bill has been in draft since 2018, as technology lawyer Salma Khan noted in Dawn in August, and recent analysis argues new digital governance rights rest on executive policy rather than statute. Signing a global compact first could be strategic: an international commitment creates a benchmark that domestic rules must then be written to meet.
What Pakistan’s roadmap already contains
The minister will not present from a blank page. The federal cabinet has approved the National AI Policy 2025, which targets training one million AI professionals by 2030, an AI Innovation Fund and an AI Venture Fund for startups, 50,000 AI-driven civic projects, 1,000 local AI products within five years, 3,000 annual AI scholarships, and 1,000 research projects.
The policy also backs a national large language model so young Pakistanis can use AI systems that reflect their own culture, language and identity, plus infrastructure such as data centres and the Pak-China data transit system that could make Pakistan a regional hub for internet traffic between Central Asia and China via Karachi. Alongside it, the Digital Nation Pakistan Act 2025 created the Pakistan Digital Authority and a National Digital Commission chaired by the prime minister.
The meetings that may matter more than the signature
The two bilateral meetings could produce something concrete. The minister has said Google’s AI and digital initiatives created more than 10,000 jobs in Pakistan, with over 3,000 people trained through various technology programmes, while the government works toward a pledge of one million AI trainings over three years. A meeting with Google’s vice president is the natural place to turn those numbers into committed programmes.
The World Bank meeting is about the other half of the equation: money for digital infrastructure. The compact’s talk of equitable access means little if the systems built on it exclude the poorest. A 2025 World Bank assessment, cited in The Nation in September, found the National Socio-Economic Registry left out about 2.2 million of the poorest households. AI-driven public services built on such data risk entrenching exclusion, making financing and design the real test of this visit.
What to watch next
Four things will tell us whether this first becomes substance: whether the Compact is actually signed and its text published; what specific commitments Pakistan’s presented roadmap contains; whether the Google and World Bank meetings produce programmes rather than photo opportunities; and whether the long-pending data protection law finally moves, because an AI future without enforceable data rules is built on sand.
Being first to sign is a diplomatic win, and the National AI Policy gives the minister real material to present. The honest assessment: the signature is the easy part. Implementation, regulation and inclusion are the hard part, and they are still ahead.
For more on Pakistan’s technology ambitions, see Pakistan’s first astronaut preparing for a Tiangong space station mission, research into space-based solar power, the PAF’s newly revealed Al-Murtajiz drone and the latest technology news from Pakistan.
