Cuba governs artificial intelligence through state policy, not law. For a jurisdiction whose only AI-specific instrument is a strategy, that confirmed founding seat is the profile's centre of gravity.
The shape is a sparse, state-led jurisdiction: one AI-specific instrument in the soft tier, none in force, and a binding tier of general law an AI dispute would meet. The distinctive weight sits in the regional band, where Cuba holds a confirmed founding seat in the new AI cooperation organization.
Cuba's data-protection statute and the general law most likely to reach an AI harm. Article 23.2 gives the data subject a right to object to processing, whether automated or not, that significantly affects their interests or profiles their performance, economic situation, health or behaviour. It is an objection right, not an AI-transparency or automated-decision-explanation duty; the text does not mention artificial intelligence or algorithms. Oversight sits with the Ministry of Justice, with no independent data-protection authority.
Source: Gaceta OficialThe constitutional basis for personal-data protection, including the rights of access, non-disclosure and rectification that the data-protection law implements.
Source: Gaceta OficialThe framework for the informatization of society. Its article 68 enumerates information-and-communications-technology contraventions, and it is the state's principal instrument for penalizing online content. Technology-general, with no AI-specific provision.
Source: Gaceta Oficial; MINCOMThe telecommunications, ICT and radio-spectrum statute, the general regime a networked AI service operates within. No AI-specific provision.
Source: Gaceta OficialThe national cybersecurity regime and its incident-response model. Resolution 105 classifies incidents, including a category for harmful content, but carries no AI-specific rule.
Source: Gaceta OficialThe authorship framework, which repealed the 1977 copyright law. Article 10.1 defines the creator as the natural person who creates a work, and the law carries no computer-generated-works provision. Its limitations are an enumerated list, and article 2 conjugates authors' rights with the interest of society in the broadest access to creation. No AI-authorship rule.
Source: Gaceta Oficial; WIPO LexThe invention, industrial-design and utility-model framework. Natural and legal persons may file, and the inventive act is conceived as a human one, with no AI-inventorship provision or practice. No AI-specific rule.
Source: Gaceta Oficial; WIPO LexThe flagship AI-specific instrument and the country's only one. It sets direction across ethics and regulation, human capital, applications, public administration, science and communication, and contemplates future AI rule-making. It is a government programme that tasks state bodies and creates no private-operator duties.
Source: government releaseConfirmed founding member; signed in Shanghai 16 Jul 2026 by the Minister of Communications, Mayra Arevich Marin; Cuba among the twenty-nine founding states. Official source: Cuban government press (Granma, Cubadebate).
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; a readiness assessment is reported for Cuba. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Cuba as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024, the second a China-led capacity-building resolution; Cuba 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 at the bottom of the force axis, above a binding tier of general law that carries no AI specificity.
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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 Cuba, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Cuba has no public court-judgment database and a state-controlled judiciary, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported and no Cuba-specific AI incident surfaced. Per the fabrication screen, no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the OCPI legislation pages; the Gaceta Oficial; Cuban media of record. Cuba provides essentially no public court-judgment access, so the absence of case law is not proof that no matter exists.
Cuba renewed its copyright and invention statutes in 2022 and 2012 without reaching AI: the creator is a natural person, the invention is a human act, the limitations are closed, and a national AI strategy sits in policy, 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 invention decree lets natural and legal persons file and conceives the inventive act as a human one, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be the inventive author. No examination practice, guidance or grant evidence specific to AI-assisted inventions exists, and no DABUS-type filing has tested Cuba.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingThe copyright law defines the creator as the natural person who creates a work, so a human who directs an AI tool and contributes authorship can hold rights, while purely AI-generated output has no qualifying creator 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 limitations are a closed enumerated list, and article 2 conjugates authors' rights with the broadest social access to creation, a general principle rather than a mining carve-out. With copyright silent on mining, 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 findingCuba is a WIPO member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Cuba or OCPI, 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 OCPI 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. The data-protection law's objection right is not a disclosure duty, and the 2024 strategy is policy with 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.
Cuba governs artificial intelligence through state policy, not law. A national digital-transformation policy that carries an AI strategy was approved in 2024 and folded into the development plan to 2030, led by the Ministry of Communications, but it is a government programme that creates no operator duties. What binds is general law: a data-protection statute in force since 2023, the informatization and telecommunications decrees that also serve as the state's content-control tools, and the intellectual-property statutes, which confine authorship and inventorship to human makers. There is no AI-specific binding rule of any kind. Cuba's posture is one of digital sovereignty and closing the technology gap, expressed through open-source preference and alignment with China, and its clearest AI-governance act of 2026 is external: Cuba is a confirmed founding member of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, its accession signed by the Minister of Communications in Shanghai. For a jurisdiction whose only AI-specific instrument is a strategy, that confirmed founding seat is the profile's centre of gravity.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Cuba, 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. Cuba's standout credential is a founding seat in the AI cooperation organization that is confirmed in its own official record, named signatory and all.
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