Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a profound and far-reaching transformation of politics, economics, and society. This thesis aims to understand AI’s global governance and the role of non-state actors. The first paper introduces a new framework for analyzing AI as an object of governance through a lens of artificial agents. This interdisciplinary framework merges social science and technical perspectives, enabling a comprehensive examination of AI governance across various applications. The second paper explores the interaction between public and private authorities in AI governance, presenting a detailed case study of privacy standards for the Web. It highlights the dynamic nature of these interactions through historical examples, emphasizing the co-constitutive nature of hybrid authority and the evolving role of technical standards in governing online privacy. The third paper investigates the role of ethics in AI governance, conceptualizing ethics as constitutive rules shaping objectives, identities, and behaviors within an emergent governance complex. Through an analysis of 186 documents, the study reveals variations in how stakeholders value and interpret key principles. It posits that this variation poses a challenge to establishing cohesive governance frameworks for AI. Taken together, this research enhances our understanding of AI as an object of governance, the challenges and considerations for hybrid modes of governance, and offers empirical insights into the conditions for its emergent governance complex.