Cameroon has moved quickly on the foundations of digital governance while leaving artificial intelligence to policy. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific instrument is a strategy, that confirmed founding seat and the regional-IP setting are the profile's centre of gravity.
The shape is a jurisdiction that has built data and cyber foundations but left AI to strategy: one AI-specific instrument in the soft tier, none in force, and a binding tier of general law an AI dispute would meet, with patents granted regionally.
Cameroon's first comprehensive data-protection statute and the general law most likely to reach an AI harm. It defines profiling and sets controller duties including impact assessment and records of processing. Its automated-decision safeguards were not confirmed in the available text, and with the implementing decree still pending its full enforceability is limited. A data-protection instrument, not an AI-specific one.
Source: Presidency of the RepublicThe security framework for networks and information systems, with electronic certification and digital-evidence rules. Technology-general, with no AI-specific provision.
Source: official gazette; ANTICThe electronic-commerce framework, part of the 2010 digital package, the enabling layer for electronic and AI-mediated dealings.
Source: official gazetteThe authorship framework. Article 7(1) defines the author as the natural person who created the work, and adds that a natural person who conceived a work and triggered its realization by an automatic process is also its author, an explicit refusal of machine authorship. Its exceptions are a closed enumerated list with no text-and-data-mining exception.
Source: WIPO LexThe patent framework. Cameroon has no national patent statute; patents are granted centrally by the African Intellectual Property Organization under the Bangui Agreement, a single regional title. The right to the patent belongs to the inventor, a natural person, and there is no AI-inventorship provision.
Source: OAPI; WIPO LexThe flagship AI-specific instrument, presented at the national AI consultations and organized around governance, data infrastructure, capacity and cooperation. It is policy under finalization and contemplates a future framework AI law and an AI governance body, none of which yet exist.
Source: government recordsThe digital-transformation track of the national development strategy that frames the AI effort. No AI-specific duties.
Source: government recordsConfirmed founding member; signed in Shanghai 16 Jul 2026 by the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Minette Libom Li Likeng, for the Republic of Cameroon; Cameroon among the twenty-nine founding states. Official source: Cameroonian press (digitalbusiness.africa).
Adopted by the AU Executive Council July 2024; Cameroon an AU member. Official source: au.int.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; a readiness assessment is in progress. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Cameroon as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Cameroon bound as a UN member; no co-sponsorship confirmed. Official source: UN records.
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 that leads with an AI-specific strategy low on the force axis, above a binding tier of general law, with patents granted regionally.
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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 Cameroon, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Cameroon publishes few judgments, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported and no Cameroon-specific AI incident surfaced. Per the fabrication screen, no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the OAPI pages; the official gazette; Cameroonian media of record. Cameroon publishes few judgments, so the absence of case law is not proof that no matter exists.
Cameroon's copyright law attributes even automatic-process works to the human who conceived them, patents run regionally through OAPI in Yaounde, and the exceptions are closed with no mining lane.
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 findingPatents are granted regionally by the African Intellectual Property Organization under the Bangui Agreement, which vests the right to the patent in the inventor, a natural person, 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 the regional office.
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 who created the work and adds that a natural person who conceived a work and triggered its realization by an automatic process is also its author, so authorship stays with the human even for machine-produced output, and there is no computer-generated-works route for autonomous output. A human who directs an AI tool can hold rights; purely AI-generated output has no qualifying author, and the point 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. 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 findingCameroon is a WIPO member and an OAPI member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Cameroon or the regional office, 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 regional office or a national body on examining AI-related filings was found; industrial property is administered regionally. 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 duties are not a content-provenance rule, and the AI strategy is policy.
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.
Cameroon has moved quickly on the foundations of digital governance while leaving artificial intelligence to policy. A first comprehensive data-protection law was enacted in December 2024, creating a personal-data-protection authority, though its implementing decree is still awaited, and a national AI strategy was presented in 2025 and is being finalized. Neither imposes a binding AI operator duty. What binds is general law: the 2024 data law, the 2010 cybersecurity and electronic-communications statutes, and the intellectual-property regime, in which copyright is national and patents run regionally. The copyright law is notably firm on human authorship, providing that even a work produced by an automatic process belongs to the natural person who conceived and triggered it, an explicit refusal of machine authorship. Patents are granted centrally by the African Intellectual Property Organization, whose headquarters sit in Yaounde. Cameroon is a founding member of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, confirmed in its own press with a named ministerial signatory. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific instrument is a strategy, that confirmed founding seat and the regional-IP setting are the profile's centre of gravity.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Cameroon, 12 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. Cameroon's standout credential is a founding seat in the AI cooperation organization confirmed in its own press with a named signatory.
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