The Republic of the Congo, Brazzaville, has almost no artificial-intelligence governance in place and is only now beginning to build it. For a jurisdiction at the very start of its AI-governance build, that reported founding seat and the emptiness of the domestic field are the profile's defining features.
The shape is one of the emptiest in the field: nothing AI-specific is in force, a strategy has only just entered drafting, and the binding tier is general law an AI dispute would meet, with patents granted regionally.
Congo-Brazzaville's data-protection statute and the general law most likely to reach an AI harm. Its article 13 bars a decision producing legal effects on a person taken solely on automated processing intended to profile them, and its impact-assessment provisions cover systematic automated evaluation. The supervisory commission it refers to was created only later and is not yet operational. A data-protection instrument, not an AI-specific one.
Source: Journal OfficielThe cybersecurity framework for networks and information systems, aligned with the regional and continental conventions. Technology-general, with no AI-specific provision.
Source: Journal OfficielThe computer-crime law, the penal counterpart to the cybersecurity law. No AI or deepfake-specific provision.
Source: Journal OfficielThe authorship framework. It is a classic author's-rights law with moral rights, protecting the creator of a work of the mind by the sole fact of its creation, and it carries no computer-generated-works provision. Its exceptions are a closed enumerated list with no text-and-data-mining exception, and protection runs for fifty years after the author's death.
Source: primary text; FAOLEXThe patent framework. Congo-Brazzaville has no national patent statute; patents are granted centrally by the African Intellectual Property Organization under the Bangui Agreement. The right to the patent belongs to the inventor, a natural person, and there is no AI-inventorship provision.
Source: OAPI; Journal OfficielThe broad digital-transformation policy, without meaningful AI-governance content, that frames the digital agenda. No AI-specific duties.
Source: government recordsThe prospective AI strategy, launched into drafting in Brazzaville in 2026 with a focus on national languages and a knowledge-economy target. It is at the very start of its development, with no adopted text and no operator duties.
Source: government and press recordsReported founding role; the Republic of the Congo is listed among the twenty-nine founders in reconstructed rosters, distinguished from the DRC by the flag used, but not named in the official Chinese release and no Congolese government confirmation found. Official source: Chinese and allied media roster.
Adopted by the AU Executive Council July 2024; Congo-Brazzaville an AU member. Official source: au.int.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; no readiness assessment produced, the cited Congo assessment being the DRC's. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Congo-Brazzaville as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Congo-Brazzaville 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 stark: every in-force instrument sits at the low-specificity end, because nothing in Congo-Brazzaville is yet written for AI.
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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 Congo-Brazzaville, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Congolese court judgments are effectively not publicly accessible, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported and no Congo-Brazzaville-specific AI incident surfaced. Per the fabrication screen, no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the OAPI pages; the Journal Officiel; Congolese media of record. Congo-Brazzaville provides essentially no public court-judgment access, so the absence of case law is not proof that no matter exists.
The Republic of the Congo runs a 1982 copyright law and OAPI regional patents: the human creator holds the rights, the inventor is a natural person, the exceptions are closed, and no AI strategy is yet in force.
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.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingThe copyright law protects the creator of a work of the mind, a human maker, 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. 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 findingCongo-Brazzaville is a WIPO member and an OAPI member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from the country 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 automated-decision ban is not a disclosure duty, and no AI strategy is in force.
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.
The Republic of the Congo, Brazzaville, has almost no artificial-intelligence governance in place and is only now beginning to build it. There is no AI law and no adopted AI strategy: a national AI strategy entered its drafting phase in May 2026, with United Nations support and a focus on national languages, and remains nascent. What binds is general law: a 2019 data-protection law whose supervisory commission was created only in 2025 and is not yet operational, the two 2020 cybersecurity and cybercrime laws, and the intellectual-property regime, in which copyright is a 1982 national law confining authorship to a human maker while patents run regionally through the Bangui Agreement. This profile is for Congo-Brazzaville, not the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, with which it is easily confused; the two have separate legal systems, and several instruments and assessments attributed to the Congo belong to the DRC. Congo-Brazzaville is listed among the founders of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, but the membership is recorded as reported, since no Congolese government source or named signatory was found. For a jurisdiction at the very start of its AI-governance build, that reported founding seat and the emptiness of the domestic field are the profile's defining features.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Congo, 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. Congo-Brazzaville's AI-governance footprint is thin, and the WAICO entry carries a caveat, including a disambiguation from the DRC.
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