Cambodia governs artificial intelligence through general law and a growing stack of drafts, not through any statute written for it. The distinctive feature is that Cambodia sits on two international tracks at once, a signatory of the Paris summit statement and a founding member of the China-led WAICO, and its most substantive AI-specific work so far is a completed UNESCO readiness assessment.
The shape of the set is a jurisdiction that has not yet legislated for AI but is drafting toward it. The binding tier is general law an AI dispute would meet, the AI-specific texts are all unadopted, and the profile carries real weight in the regional band.
The telecom-sector statute and the backbone of state interception: its Article 97 authorizes covert recording of communications with the approval of a legitimate authority, and it imposes secrecy and data-handling duties on operators. Not AI-specific, but the instrument through which network and internet control runs.
Source: Open Development MekongWould route internet traffic through a single state-controlled gateway enabling monitoring and blocking, with connection duties on service providers. Its commencement was indefinitely postponed and it remains on the books but unimplemented, with occasional reports of revived interest.
Source: analysis (HRW)The country's first dedicated cyber-fraud statute, a response to the scam-compound crisis. It criminalizes technology-enabled fraud with extraterritorial reach and tiered penalties rising to life imprisonment, and provides for asset confiscation and platform closure. General law rather than AI-specific, but the statute deepfake-enabled scams are charged under.
Source: firm analysisRecognizes electronic records, signatures and evidence, and imposes a data-security duty on any business that electronically stores personal information. One of only two statutory footholds for personal-data protection pending a dedicated law.
Source: Ministry of CommerceProhibits unfair and deceptive practices and misleading information in trade with consumers. Together with the e-commerce law it carries the incidental data-protection provisions Cambodia relies on.
Source: firm analysisThe general criminal basis for online content and fraud, through the fraud, forgery, defamation and incitement provisions. No deepfake-specific offence exists, so synthetic-media conduct is charged by analogy, and for scams under the 2026 anti-fraud law.
Source: general legal analysisThree statutes: the Law on Marks, Trade Names and Acts of Unfair Competition (2002), the Law on Patents, Utility Models and Industrial Designs (2003), and the Law on Copyright and Related Rights (2003). Administration is split between the industry, commerce and culture ministries. None addresses artificial intelligence; they carry the human authorship and inventorship rules the AI-IP section reads.
Source: WIPO LexThe umbrella digital policy, which treats AI and robotics as disruptive technologies and sets measures to boost AI investment and application in data governance. Aspirational, with no operator duties.
Source: MPTCThe digital-government companion, citing AI as an enabling technology for public-sector modernization. Sets no binding AI duties.
Source: government portalThe country's most substantive AI-specific work: a diagnostic of AI readiness across legal, social, economic and technical dimensions that recommends a national AI governance framework and ethical principles. Advisory rather than a duty-creating instrument.
Source: unesco.orgThe national AI framework, organized around six priorities and dozens of measures across skills, data, digital government and responsible AI. Not yet promulgated, and a strategy rather than a statute once adopted.
Source: OECD.AI; Open Development CambodiaThe intended vehicle for ethical and responsible-AI principles and risk measures, and the text that could eventually carry AI-specific duties. Not yet adopted.
Source: ai.gov.khA GDPR-modelled data-protection regime with controller duties, a data-protection officer requirement and administrative fines. Its absence leaves Cambodia without a general data-protection statute, relying on the 2019 laws.
Source: firm analysisWould establish cybersecurity governance, critical-infrastructure obligations and a national authority. Distinct from the enacted 2026 anti-fraud law, and separate from an older cybercrime bill that has long stalled.
Source: civil-society analysisFounding member; signed Shanghai, 16 Jul 2026, by the Minister of Post and Telecommunications. Official source: Cambodian state news agency and the Phnom Penh Post; China State Council release.
Signatory; 11 Feb 2025. Official source: Elysee official signatory list, position 7.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; national readiness assessment report launched 1 Jul 2025. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Cambodia as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Cambodia bound as a UN member; no co-sponsorship claimed. Official source: UN records.
Endorsed 2024 and expanded January 2025, as an ASEAN member; non-binding. Official source: asean.org.
17 Apr 2025; records cooperation on the digital economy and AI under a bilateral community framework. Official source: PRC and Cambodian foreign-ministry texts.
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 binding tier of general law low on AI specificity, and a cluster of AI-specific drafts near the bottom of the force axis.
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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 Cambodia, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Cambodia has limited public access to court judgments, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported. The two matters below are recorded as reported incidents, not adjudicated cases, and per the fabrication screen no case number is invented. Both concern the country's scam-compound problem, where AI tools are documented in use.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the IP office pages; Cambodia publishes little court-judgment material; reputable Cambodian and international media were swept for reported incidents.
Cambodia's IP statutes date from 2002 and 2003 and stand unamended for AI: the author is a natural person, the exceptions are enumerated, and the offices have issued no AI guidance.
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 20 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 vests the right in the inventor and requires a personal signed naming declaration, which presupposes a natural person, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. The system is small and leans on recognition of foreign grants, so there is no domestic examination practice and the AI-assisted question is untested.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingThe copyright law vests title in the natural person in whose name the work is created, 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 exceptions are an enumerated regime, covering named uses such as private use, quotation, education, library reproduction and news reporting, 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 findingCambodia is a WIPO member, joined in 1995, and signed a WIPO cooperation memorandum in 2026, but the WIPO Conversation submissions archive shows no traceable submission from Cambodia or its IP offices, 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 IP offices on examining AI-related filings was found. Recent IP modernization is procedural, an online filing system launched in 2025 and a patent database in 2024, not examiner guidance for AI-originated filings. 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. Filing requirements are the standard bibliographic ones, and no AI-specific or content-provenance rule exists in any statute.
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.
Cambodia governs artificial intelligence through general law and a growing stack of drafts, not through any statute written for it. What binds is a telecommunications law with broad surveillance powers, a 2019 pair of electronic-commerce and consumer statutes that carry the country's only data-protection provisions, a 2026 anti-fraud law built for the scam-compound crisis, and the penal code. What is in motion is a busy draft tier, a national AI strategy, an AI governance framework, a data-protection bill and a cybersecurity bill, none of it adopted. The intellectual-property statutes date from the early 2000s and confine authorship and inventorship to human makers. The distinctive feature is that Cambodia sits on two international tracks at once, a signatory of the Paris summit statement and a founding member of the China-led WAICO, and its most substantive AI-specific work so far is a completed UNESCO readiness assessment.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Cambodia, 23 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. Cambodia is notable for sitting on two tracks at once, a signatory of the Paris summit statement and a founding member of WAICO.
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