Algeria builds AI institutions and strategy rather than binding AI law. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific instruments are institutions and a strategy, that state-led architecture and the confirmed founding seat are the profile's centre of gravity.
The shape is a state-led jurisdiction that leads with institutions and strategy: a cluster of AI bodies and a strategy sit in the soft tier, no dedicated AI law exists, and the binding tier is general law an AI dispute would meet, recently reinforced on the data-protection side.
Algeria's data-protection statute and the general law most likely to reach an AI harm. It grants access, rectification and opposition rights, including against profiling for commercial prospecting, and the 2025 amendment adds a mandatory data-protection officer, a processing register, limits on fully automated decision-making and data-localization duties. The supervisory authority is operational. These are data-protection duties, not AI-specific ones.
Source: official gazetteThe computer-crime and electronic-surveillance law, with search, seizure and a national coordinating body. Technology-general, with no AI-specific provision.
Source: official gazette; WIPO LexThe content-control offence criminalizing the dissemination of false news harming public order or state security. Used against online speech, and technology-general rather than deepfake-specific.
Source: official gazetteThe electronic-commerce framework, the enabling layer for electronic and AI-mediated dealings.
Source: official gazetteThe authorship framework. Article 12 defines the author as the natural person who creates the work, legal persons holding rights only in defined cases, and the law carries no computer-generated-works provision. Its exceptions are a closed enumerated list with no text-and-data-mining exception.
Source: WIPO LexThe patent framework. Article 10 vests the right to the patent in the inventor, a natural person, or a successor in title, with the inventor's moral right to be named. No AI-inventorship provision, and Algeria operates a national patent system rather than a regional one.
Source: WIPO LexThe flagship AI-specific instrument, organized around research, an enabling environment, local capacity, start-ups, data centres and priority sectors. It sets direction and creates no operator duties, and its formal government adoption had not been confirmed on the record.
Source: government recordsThe state AI bodies: the High Commission for Digitalization, created by presidential decree in 2023 and headed by a High Commissioner with ministerial rank; a national scientific council on AI; and a national higher school for AI. Institutions that build capacity rather than bind operators.
Source: official gazetteConfirmed founding member; signed in Shanghai 16 Jul 2026 by the High Commissioner for Digitalization, Meriem Benmouloud, on the President's mandate; Algeria among the twenty-nine founding states. Official source: Algerian state agency (APS); Chinese State Council release.
Adopted by the AU Executive Council July 2024; Algeria an AU member. Official source: au.int.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; no readiness assessment produced. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Algeria as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Algeria a lead sponsor of the China-led capacity-building resolution 78/311. Official source: UN records; the resolution sponsor list.
Adopted June 2025; Algeria a member of the Arab League educational, cultural and scientific organization. Official source: ALECSO.
Axes: specificity (x, 0-100) is how squarely the instrument is written for AI; force (y, 0-100) is how hard it binds. Placements are editorial judgments for the comparison plot; the tier column is the authoritative classification. The pattern is a state-led jurisdiction whose AI-specific weight is a strategy and institutions low on the force axis, above a binding tier of general law.
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The binding and prescriptive corner is the crowded one: the CAC-led measures put force and detail together, service by service. The sector guidance sits just left of the binding line, nonbinding in form but treated as obligatory. Dashed markers are drafts; the National AI Law would consolidate the whole stack into one statute.
No adjudicated court case where artificial intelligence is materially at issue was found in Algeria, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Algerian court judgments are not systematically published, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported and no Algeria-specific AI incident surfaced. Per the fabrication screen, no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the INAPI and ONDA pages; the official gazette; Algerian media of record. Algeria does not systematically publish court judgments, so the absence of case law is not proof that no matter exists.
Algeria confines authorship and inventorship to natural persons under its 2003 ordinances, the exceptions are a closed list, and the national AI strategy and institutions sit outside the intellectual-property questions.
The AI-IP Index reads a country on two questions that usually get folded together. Accommodation asks how far the law will go to protect intellectual property that a machine helped produce. Institution asks how much administrative machinery sits behind that law: its guidance, its international submissions, its disclosure duties.
A country can be generous on paper and have built almost nothing, or cautious and highly organised, so the two are scored apart and reported as a pair. Each rests on three questions, scored 0, 0.5 or 1.
How far the law will protect intellectual property that a machine helped make.
How much administrative machinery sits behind that law.
The scale runs the same way on both axes: 0 is the open or developed end, 1 is the restrictive or absent one, and 0.5 sits between for anything conditional or untested. Read as a pair, the two scores show whether AI-assisted work can be protected here, and whether the office has said so in writing.
Within each axis the three questions carry equal weight. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. An AI developer might reasonably value freedom to train above patent inventorship, but weighting is where indices lose their credibility, so the score stays a flat mean and the choice is stated in the open. Each cell also cites a statute section, a case or an office page, so any single score can be challenged without disputing the rest.
Two positions are worth naming. A country can be open on the law but thin on machinery, an open-but-undeveloped stance that bets on ambiguity. Or it can be restrictive on rights yet run an active office, a restrictive-but-developed stance that reflects a settled policy choice rather than a gap. The pair of scores tells those two apart where a single ranking would blur them.
A rubric is only as good as the results it produces on cases where the answer is already known. These three jurisdictions sit outside this series and are scored with the same six questions, as a check. Their law is the best documented anywhere, so if the scale puts them where the law actually sits, the scale is doing its job. They are reference points, not editions.
Firm judicial settlement at both poles and the weakest statutory position on training. The courts have closed the door on AI inventors and AI authors, while everything on training rides on unresolved fair-use litigation. There is no per se duty to declare AI use in a filing, only a candour duty that bites where the use is material.
Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022); Thaler v. Perlmutter (D.C. Cir. 2025), cert. denied 2 Mar 2026; Bartz v. Anthropic (N.D. Cal. 2025); USPTO revised inventorship guidance, 90 Fed. Reg. 54636 (28 Nov 2025); 89 Fed. Reg. 58128 (17 Jul 2024); 89 Fed. Reg. 25609 (11 Apr 2024).
The most permissive statutory position on training and the strongest transparency duty in force, sitting over an authorship question no court has answered. Read the label carefully: training and transparency run through EU law, but patents run through the EPO under the European Patent Convention, which is not an EU institution and covers 39 states.
Directive (EU) 2019/790, arts. 3 and 4; Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, art. 53(1)(c) and (d); EPO J 8/20 (2021); EPO Guidelines G-II 3.3.1 (2026 edition); Infopaq C-5/08; Painer C-145/10.
Liberal on patents since the Supreme Court abandoned the Aerotel test in February 2026, conservative on copyright, and currently thin on AI-specific machinery after the dedicated AI examination guidance was withdrawn. Section 9(3) nominally protects a work with no human author for 50 years, the widest AI-output right on paper, but no court has ever applied it to generative AI.
CDPA 1988 ss. 9(3), 12(7), 29A, 178; Thaler v Comptroller-General [2023] UKSC 49; Comptroller-General v Emotional Perception AI [2026] UKSC 3; UKIPO practice notice, 14 Jul 2026; Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 ss. 135 to 137.
The check earned its keep twice. The untested rule held: section 9(3) of the UK Copyright Act reads like the widest AI-output right anywhere, yet because no court has applied it to generative AI it scores as untested rather than open, which is the correct answer and the one a headline reading would miss. The check also exposed a limit worth stating. The Institution axis measures AI-specific machinery, not general office capacity, so a long-established office can score poorly when it has withdrawn its AI guidance and imposes no disclosure duty. Read that axis as what an office has built for AI, nothing wider.
Each row below carries the test we applied and the finding behind the score, with a source. The rationale, not the number, is the point.
Scores verified 21 July 2026, against AIP Index codebook v1.0. A score is only true as of its date.
What we look forA granted patent or a clearly workable examination route, not merely a silent statute.
The findingThe patent ordinance vests the right to the patent in the inventor, a natural person, with the inventor's moral right to be named, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. No examination practice or guidance addresses AI-assisted inventions, and no DABUS-type filing has tested Algeria.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingThe copyright ordinance defines the author as the natural person who creates the work, so a human who directs an AI tool and contributes authorship can hold rights, while purely AI-generated output has no qualifying author and no route to protection. There is no computer-generated-works provision and no ruling tests the point, so it is untested.
What we look forA statutory or judicial mining lane. Silence scores against the miner, since the reserved-rights default governs.
The findingThere is no training or text-and-data-mining exception. The copyright exceptions are a closed enumerated list, with no open fair-use clause and no mining carve-out, and no reform is in motion. With copyright silent, the reserved-rights default governs the use of works for training.
What we look forA traceable, substantive submission on the record, not bare membership.
The findingAlgeria is a WIPO member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Algeria or INAPI, and no substantive session participation was found. Membership without a submission earns the middle.
What we look forA standalone AI examination text, not AI handled quietly under general practice.
The findingNo dedicated guidance from INAPI or ONDA on examining AI-related filings was found; their published guidance is the ordinary filing and examination rules. A reasonable-search negative.
What we look forA mandatory declaration inside the filing, not a proposal or an informal request.
The findingNo filing requires declaring AI use, and no in-force instrument imposes a labeling or transparency duty on AI-generated content. The data law's limits on automated decisions are not a disclosure duty, and the AI strategy carries no operative content-provenance rule.
Method. Six questions, three per axis, scored 0, 0.5 or 1 against AIP Index codebook v1.0. The three questions in each axis are weighted equally by choice, and the two axes are reported as a pair, never blended into one number. Every score cites a statute, case or office page, carries a verified date, and records its direction of travel apart from the level. Positions are editorial judgements read from primary law and office practice, not official scores. WIPO's public catalogue of IP-office AI initiatives does not score jurisdictions on this basis, so the readings here come straight from the source law. Not legal advice.
Algeria builds AI institutions and strategy rather than binding AI law. A High Commission for Digitalization created in 2023, a national scientific council on AI, and a dedicated higher school for AI carry the state's AI effort, and a national AI strategy has been unveiled, but formal adoption is still pending and none of it imposes an operator duty. What binds is general law, and it was strengthened in 2025: a data-protection statute of 2018, amended by a 2025 law that adds a data-protection officer, a processing register, limits on fully automated decisions and data-localization, sits over the cybercrime and content statutes and the intellectual-property codes, which confine authorship and inventorship to human makers. Algeria aligns with the China and Global-South tracks, a lead sponsor of the UN capacity-building resolution and a member of the BRICS development bank, while staying outside the Western instruments. It is a founding member of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, confirmed in its own state record, its accession signed by the High Commissioner for Digitalization. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific instruments are institutions and a strategy, that state-led architecture and the confirmed founding seat are the profile's centre of gravity.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Algeria, 14 of them, ordered by how hard each one binds; it reads the same instruments a second time by how squarely each is written for AI; and it records the matters where AI meets the law, with what was searched and found empty stated as plainly as what was found. Every claim traces to a primary source, and absences are recorded rather than papered over.
A membership claim enters this table only from an official list: a declaration annex, a treaty signature table, an organization's own record or an official government statement. Algeria aligns with the China and Global-South tracks, a lead sponsor of the UN capacity-building resolution and a confirmed WAICO founder.
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