THE BRUSSELS ECHO IN NAIROBI: Kenya's AI Bill 2026 and the EU's Long Regulatory Shadow

This article undertakes a comparative legal analysis of Kenya's Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026 and the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689). It examines the structural and substantive mirroring between the two instruments, situating this pattern within the broader phenomenon of EU-to-Africa regulatory transplantation previously observed in the context of the General Data Protection Regulation and Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019. Drawing on comparative legal methodology, the Brussels Effect theory, and the growing body of scholarship on legal transplants in developing economies, this article argues that while such transplantation carries genuine merit in terms of international credibility and rights protection, it also risks producing legal frameworks that are contextually misaligned, institutionally premature, and potentially innovation-stifling, particularly when the receiving jurisdiction lacks the enforcement infrastructure to give those frameworks meaningful life. The article concludes by calling for a more deliberate, locally contextualised approach to AI governance in Kenya and, by extension, across the African continent.