Free SA has made an initial submission to Parliament opposing elements of South Africa’s Draft National AI Policy that risk burdening innovation with excessive bureaucracy, compliance costs, and expanded state control.
While the draft policy correctly recognises the importance of protecting constitutional rights, promoting inclusion, and building South Africa’s AI capacity, Free SA warns that these goals must not be used to justify an unnecessarily centralised regulatory regime.
The organisation has raised concern over proposals for multiple new institutions, including an AI Regulatory Authority, Ethics Board, Commission, and Ombudsperson, arguing that these structures may duplicate existing functions, increase administrative costs, and create new barriers for startups and small businesses.
Free SA also cautions against proposals for centralised AI monitoring and cross-system data integration, which could expand state surveillance and concentrate sensitive personal information without sufficiently clear limits on executive power. Broad audit, certification, and explainability requirements may further slow innovation and impose disproportionate costs on entrepreneurs and emerging firms.
Gideon Joubert, spokesperson for Free SA, said:
“Artificial intelligence should help drive South Africa’s recovery, not become another excuse for overregulation. We need an AI policy that protects rights and manages genuine risks, but without creating a maze of new institutions, compliance burdens, and state oversight that smothers innovation before it can deliver growth and opportunity.”
Free SA supports an AI framework that upholds constitutional rights, protects privacy in line with existing law, relies on current institutions where possible, and keeps innovation open and accessible to the private sector.
“South Africa does not need an AI super-state,” Joubert added. “It needs a smart, limited, accountable policy environment that allows innovation, entrepreneurship, and investment to flourish.”
Free SA has called for a more restrained and practical policy approach that protects the public without regulating innovation to death.