Abstract
Central bank digital currency (CBDC) is often presented as a technical response to declining cash use, private payment concentration, financial exclusion, and the rise of tokenized money. This critical integrative review argues that an AI-enabled CBDC is also a constitutional and political institution: it reallocates control over money, payment data, bank funding, and the conditions of economic participation. Integrating monetary, legal, financial-stability, digital-rights, AI-governance, and global-justice scholarship published across 2023–2026 with foundational theory, the review develops four findings. First, CBDC does not have a fixed effect on commercial bank deposits; deposit substitution, liquidity transformation, run risk, and credit supply depend on remuneration, holding limits, access architecture, interoperability, and the central bank’s crisis backstop. Second, transaction-level data create a distinctive surveillance risk that cannot be resolved by encryption alone because lawful access, institutional separation, retention, inference, and remedy are legal choices. Third, AI can improve fraud detection, operational resilience, and supervisory intelligence, but it can also make financial exclusion, automated suspicion, and policy discretion less visible and harder to contest. Fourth, in emerging economies, digital divides, weak oversight, foreign technology dependence, and cross-border data flows turn CBDC design into a question of distributive and international justice. The review’s originality lies in treating AI adoption as a governance-dependent institutional process rather than a purely technical or behavioral outcome. It proposes a rights-preserving framework based on legislative authorisation, public participation, tiered privacy, cash coexistence, prudential safeguards, human review, independent oversight, algorithmic audit, interoperability, and accessible offline capability. It concludes that CBDC should be judged not by technical novelty or adoption speed, but by whether it preserves monetary trust while limiting the concentration of economic and informational power
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APA 7th edition
In-text citation: (Sharmin, 2026)
Reference: Sharmin, S. (2026). Law and politics of AI-enabled central bank digital currency governance: A critical integrative review of commercial bank deposit stability, digital rights, surveillance risk, democratic accountability, and global justice in emerging economies. journal of interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence and society.
Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in Artificial Intelligence and Society, 2(1), Article 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/jirais/19193
AMA 10th edition
In-text citation: (1), (2), (3), etc.
Reference: Sharmin S. Law and politics of AI-enabled central bank digital currency governance: A critical integrative review of commercial bank deposit stability, digital rights, surveillance risk, democratic accountability, and global justice in emerging economies. journal of interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence and society.
Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in Artificial Intelligence and Society. 2026;2(1), 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/jirais/19193
Chicago
In-text citation: (Sharmin, 2026)
Reference: Sharmin, Shahida. "Law and politics of AI-enabled central bank digital currency governance: A critical integrative review of commercial bank deposit stability, digital rights, surveillance risk, democratic accountability, and global justice in emerging economies. journal of interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence and society".
Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in Artificial Intelligence and Society 2026 2 no. 1 (2026): 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/jirais/19193
Harvard
In-text citation: (Sharmin, 2026)
Reference: Sharmin, S. (2026). Law and politics of AI-enabled central bank digital currency governance: A critical integrative review of commercial bank deposit stability, digital rights, surveillance risk, democratic accountability, and global justice in emerging economies. journal of interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence and society.
Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in Artificial Intelligence and Society, 2(1), 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/jirais/19193
MLA
In-text citation: (Sharmin, 2026)
Reference: Sharmin, Shahida "Law and politics of AI-enabled central bank digital currency governance: A critical integrative review of commercial bank deposit stability, digital rights, surveillance risk, democratic accountability, and global justice in emerging economies. journal of interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence and society".
Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in Artificial Intelligence and Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 2026, 5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/jirais/19193
Vancouver
In-text citation: (1), (2), (3), etc.
Reference: Sharmin S. Law and politics of AI-enabled central bank digital currency governance: A critical integrative review of commercial bank deposit stability, digital rights, surveillance risk, democratic accountability, and global justice in emerging economies. journal of interdisciplinary research in artificial intelligence and society. Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in Artificial Intelligence and Society. 2026;2(1):5.
https://doi.org/10.20897/jirais/19193