Laos governs artificial intelligence through general law, and it has more of that than most jurisdictions its size, without a single rule written for AI. Laos held the ASEAN chair in 2024, when the regional AI governance guide was endorsed, and it is named in the founding release of the China-led WAICO, so the profile carries real weight in the regional band.
The set is unusual for a sparse jurisdiction: the binding tier is deep, with a full stack of digital and data statutes, but every one is general law, none touches AI, and enforcement is limited. The only AI-specific instrument is an unadopted strategy, so the AI-governance weight sits in the regional band.
The country's data-protection statute. It splits data into general and specific categories, gives rights of access, correction and deletion, requires consent and a national-interest test for cross-border transfer, and imposes controller duties. Weak in practice: there is no dedicated data-protection authority, penalties are small, and implementing regulations are thin.
Source: gazette and analysisCriminalizes illegal access and data and system interference and sets procedural and cooperation rules, with the national computer-response team designated. It also carries broad content powers allowing removal of material said to undermine national security, public order or social stability.
Source: Council of Europe country pageThe principal online-content control instrument. It requires real-name registration, prohibits online criticism of the party and government and untrue information for negative purposes, and imposes liability on service providers for facilitating prohibited content. The most likely vehicle for regulating AI-generated online content under existing law.
Source: MOIC legal portalThe telecom licensing regime, which obliges service providers to cooperate with authorities in monitoring and to remove content, and requires a Lao-language interface. Binds carriers and internet-service providers.
Source: WIPO Lex; gazetteGrants legal equivalence between electronic and paper communications, contracts, signatures and records. The baseline enabler for digital dealings, including any AI-mediated contracting.
Source: gazetteRecognizes simple and digital electronic signatures and digital seals and sets a certification framework. Binds signatories and certification-service providers.
Source: firm analysis; gazetteThe general criminal law used against online conduct, through the defamation, libel and fraud offences. No deepfake-specific offence exists, so synthetic-media conduct is charged by analogy, alongside the cybercrime law.
Source: WIPO Lex; gazetteThe consolidated single statute covering copyright, patents, petty patents, trademarks, designs and more, the current version having superseded the 2007, 2011 and 2017 texts. It carries the human authorship and inventorship rules the AI-IP section reads, and contains no AI-specific provision.
Source: WIPO LexThe flagship digital policy, on a twenty-year horizon, which expressly lists artificial intelligence among the pillars of the digital economy, alongside big data and the internet of things. Aspirational, with a strategy and five-year plan beneath it and no operator duties.
Source: Ministry of Technology and CommunicationsA long-horizon cybersecurity roadmap supporting digital-economy growth. Policy rather than a duty-creating instrument.
Source: policy reportingThe readiness diagnostic that is Laos's most substantive AI-specific work: it assesses policy, institutions, capacity, infrastructure and societal impact, finds that data and cybercrime laws exist while AI-specific regulation is lacking, and feeds the national AI strategy. Advisory rather than a duty-creating instrument.
Source: unesco.orgThe country's only AI-specific policy action, in the formulation phase and shaped by the UNESCO readiness findings, intended to guide responsible AI across governance, industry, education, health, agriculture and tourism. No published draft text or adoption date, and a strategy rather than a statute once adopted.
Source: unesco.org; state mediaReferenced as a forthcoming instrument under the national digital-transformation committee, with no promulgated text located, so it is recorded here as a draft of unconfirmed status.
Source: UN and secondary reportingFounding member; signed 16 Jul 2026; Laos named in the official Chinese founding release. Official source: Xinhua and China State Council releases.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; national readiness assessment run from January 2025. Official source: unesco.org.
Endorsed in 2024 under the Lao ASEAN chairmanship, and expanded January 2025; non-binding. Official source: asean.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Laos as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Consensus adoption 1 Jul 2024; Laos a named co-sponsor. Official source: UN records; co-sponsor list.
Consensus adoption 1 Jul 2024; Laos a named co-sponsor. Official source: UN records; co-sponsor list.
Memorandum of 24 Feb 2025 at the sub-national level, between a Chinese region and Laos. Official source: Xinhua.
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 deep binding tier of general law, none of it AI-specific, and a single AI-specific strategy sitting unadopted at 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 Laos, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Laos publishes essentially no court judgments, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported. One matter is recorded below as a reported pattern, not an adjudicated case, and per the fabrication screen no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the Lao official gazette; Laos provides essentially no public court-judgment access; United Nations reporting and reputable regional media were swept for reported incidents.
Laos consolidated its intellectual-property law in 2023 without touching AI: works need a human maker's intellectual labour, there is no mining lane, and no office machinery is aimed at the question.
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 intellectual-property law vests the patent right in the applicant and owner and treats inventorship as a natural person's creative act, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. The patent system is very 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 findingCopyright protects the creative work of an author produced through their intellectual labour, so a human who directs an AI tool and contributes intellect 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 limitations follow the ordinary international pattern of named permitted uses, 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 findingLaos is a WIPO member, joined in 1995, and launched a national IP strategy project with WIPO in 2025, but the WIPO Conversation submissions archive shows no traceable submission from Laos or its IP 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 IP office on examining AI-related filings was found. Laos publishes technical regulations irregularly and mostly in Lao, and no AI filing guidance, circular or practice note exists. 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. Laos has no standalone AI law and no AI-content rule, and filing requirements are the standard bibliographic ones.
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.
Laos governs artificial intelligence through general law, and it has more of that than most jurisdictions its size, without a single rule written for AI. A 2017 data-protection law, a 2015 cybercrime law, electronic-transactions and signature statutes, an internet-content decree and a consolidated intellectual-property law all bind, and none mentions artificial intelligence. Enforcement, of the data law especially, is thin, and no dedicated regulator sits behind it. The one AI-specific move is a national AI strategy, in formulation since early 2026 and guided by a UNESCO readiness assessment, not yet adopted. The intellectual-property statute, consolidated and re-enacted in 2023, confines authorship and inventorship to human makers. Laos held the ASEAN chair in 2024, when the regional AI governance guide was endorsed, and it is named in the founding release of the China-led WAICO, so the profile carries real weight in the regional band.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Laos, 20 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. Two entries stand out: Laos is named directly in the WAICO founding release, and it held the ASEAN chair in 2024 when the regional AI guide was endorsed.
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