Belarus has no dedicated artificial-intelligence law and no statute that binds an AI operator. For a jurisdiction with no binding AI law of its own, the profile is defined less by domestic rules than by the blocs it has chosen.
The shape is a sparse jurisdiction whose AI-specific weight sits outside its binding law. A dedicated AI statute does not exist and is not being drafted; the binding tier is general law an AI dispute would meet; and the distinctive material is in the regional band, where Belarus sits inside the Eurasian and Shanghai institutions and helped write the region's model AI law.
The digital-economy framework that built the High-Technology Park and gave legal force to smart contracts, tokens and English-law-style instruments for its residents. Binding and foundational for the technology sector, but written for the digital economy, not for artificial intelligence.
Source: High-Technology ParkBelarus's data-protection statute, influenced by the European model, setting controller duties and data-subject rights, supervised by the National Center for Personal Data Protection. The statute most likely to govern an AI or data harm. It carries no dedicated solely-automated-decision provision; the nearest lever is the right to appeal an operator's actions and decisions.
Source: National Center for Personal Data ProtectionThe framework for the information sphere, information security and restricted information. Content-control exposure in practice runs through this statute together with the criminal and administrative codes, not through any AI-specific provision.
Source: national legal portalThe copyright statute. Article 4 defines the author as the natural person whose creative labour created the work. The free-use exceptions are a closed list in Chapter 4, Articles 32 to 41. There is no computer-generated-works provision and no training exception.
Source: WIPO LexThe patent statute. Article 5 confines the author of an invention to the natural person whose creative work produced it, so an artificial intelligence cannot be named. Neither the copyright nor the patent law addresses artificial intelligence.
Source: WIPO LexThe flagship digital-transformation program, roughly eighty measures spanning e-government, infrastructure and the integration of artificial intelligence and big data. It tasks state bodies and creates no private-operator duties.
Source: Ministry of Communications and InformatizationDevelopment of national technical standards and service-quality metrics for artificial intelligence, supported by international development partners. Voluntary technical standards rather than binding regulation, and the only AI-named workstream in the soft tier.
Source: state news agencyConfirmed founding member; signed in Shanghai on 16 Jul 2026; Belarusian signatory Kirill Zalessky, Minister of Communications and Informatization. Official source: Belarusian state portal belarus.by; state news agency BelTA.
Full member since 4 Jul 2024, admitted as the tenth member state at the Astana summit; party to the summit AI-cooperation commitments. Official source: SCO records; the Astana and Tianjin summit documents.
Adopted 29 May 2026 in Astana by the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council; Belarus a founding member of the union. Official source: Eurasian Economic Commission; BelTA.
Adopted by the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly in April 2025, drafted by a Belarusian academy institute; a non-binding template for national parliaments. Official source: Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the CIS; the drafting institute.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; Belarus bound as a UN member, and a co-sponsor of the dissenting amendment set aside before adoption. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex; UN records.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Belarus bound as a UN member; no co-sponsorship claimed. Official source: UN records.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; no readiness assessment produced. Official source: unesco.org.
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 country whose binding tier is entirely general law, whose AI-specific instruments are soft policy and standards near the bottom of the force axis, and whose distinctive weight is regional.
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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 Belarus, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Belarus has a controlled information environment and essentially no public court-judgment database, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported. One matter is recorded below, a police advisory rather than an adjudicated case, and per the fabrication screen no case number is invented.
Reports that the political opposition or the Cyber Partisans hacktivist collective used synthetic-media deepfakes could not be verified; their documented methods are data leaks and hand-made animation, not AI face or voice synthesis, so no AI political-deepfake matter is asserted.
Belarus holds the human line in its 2011 and 2002 statutes and is not amending them for AI: authorship and inventorship stay with natural persons, the free-use list is closed, and the AI-specific movement sits in a digital-development program and regional blocs, not in the rights law.
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 law confines the author of an invention to the natural person whose creative work produced it, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. No examination practice, guidance or grant evidence specific to AI-assisted inventions exists, and no DABUS-type filing has tested Belarus.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingThe copyright law defines the author as the natural person whose creative labour created the work, so a human who directs an AI tool and contributes authorship can hold copyright, while purely AI-generated output has no qualifying author and no route to protection. There is no computer-generated-works provision, and no registration practice or 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 free-use provisions are a closed enumerated list in Chapter 4, articles 32 to 41, covering named purposes with no open fair-use clause and no mining carve-out, and the transient-copy provision reaches only technological reproduction, not mining. 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 findingBelarus is a WIPO member, joined in 1970, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Belarus or its National Center of Intellectual Property, 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 the National Center of Intellectual Property on examining AI-related filings was found; its 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. Proposals to add a deepfake or synthetic-media rule exist in academic writing but have not been enacted.
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.
Belarus has no dedicated artificial-intelligence law and no statute that binds an AI operator. AI activity sits inside instruments written for other purposes: a 2017 presidential decree on the digital economy that built the High-Technology Park, a 2021 data-protection law with its own supervisory center, and the copyright, patent and information statutes. Above that binding layer sits soft law, a national digital-development program and voluntary technical standards, neither of which creates a duty. What is distinctive about Belarus is the company it keeps. Its AI posture is anchored in the Russia-aligned institutions: it became a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2024, joined the Eurasian Economic Union statement on responsible AI in 2026, and its national academy drafted the model AI law adopted across the Commonwealth of Independent States. Belarus is also a founding member of the World AI Cooperation Organization. For a jurisdiction with no binding AI law of its own, the profile is defined less by domestic rules than by the blocs it has chosen.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Belarus, 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. Belarus's distinctive credential is the set of Russia-aligned blocs it sits inside; the WAICO entry carries a caveat set out below.
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