Mozambique is building the foundations of digital governance but has none of them finished for artificial intelligence. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific and data instruments are all still bills, that reported founding seat and the pending legislative pipeline are the profile's defining features.
The shape is a jurisdiction with a full legislative pipeline but little in force: no adopted AI strategy, no data-protection statute yet, and a binding tier of general law an AI dispute would meet, with patents granted regionally.
The de facto data and e-commerce backbone in the absence of a data-protection statute. Its article 63 requires electronic collection, processing and disclosure of personal data to be accurate, complete and current and to preserve confidentiality. The nearest thing to a general data duty, and not AI-specific.
Source: government recordsThe telecommunications framework and the sector regulators, the general regime a networked AI service operates within.
Source: government recordsThe general penal law, covering informatic crimes and electronic fraud. No AI or deepfake-specific offence exists, so AI-enabled conduct would be charged under the general provisions.
Source: government recordsThe authorship framework. Article 9 vests copyright in the intellectual creator of the work, a human author, with automatic protection and no registration requirement, and the law carries no computer-generated-works provision. Its limitations follow the closed enumerated model with no text-and-data-mining exception.
Source: WIPO Lex; ARIPOThe industrial-property framework. The inventor is treated as a natural person, and Mozambique is an ARIPO member, so patents can run nationally through the IPI or regionally through the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization. No AI-inventorship provision.
Source: WIPO Lex; ARIPOThe digital-transformation policy framing the country's digital and AI ambitions. No AI-specific duties.
Source: government recordsThe prospective AI strategy, in draft and consultation, not yet adopted and creating no operator duties.
Source: INTICThe comprehensive data-protection bill, which would create a national data-protection authority and controller duties. Approved by the executive but not yet enacted, so no standalone data-protection statute is yet in force.
Source: INTIC; government recordsThe prospective cybersecurity and cybercrime laws, with INTIC as the intended national cybersecurity authority. Approved by the executive but not yet in force.
Source: INTICReported founding role; Mozambique is listed among the twenty-nine founders in reconstructed rosters, but not named in the official Chinese release and no Mozambican government confirmation found. Official source: Chinese and allied media roster.
Adopted by the AU Executive Council July 2024; Mozambique an AU member. Official source: au.int.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; a country profile exists and the strategy is being built with UNESCO support. Official source: unesco.org.
Global Digital Compact adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; the 2024 AI resolutions adopted by consensus; Mozambique bound as a UN member. Official source: UN records.
Global Digital Compact adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; the 2024 AI resolutions adopted by consensus; Mozambique bound as a UN member. 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 with a busy draft tier, an AI strategy and data and cyber bills, 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 Mozambique, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Mozambique has very limited public judgment access, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported. The post-election unrest of late 2024 raised online-disinformation concerns, but no verified, specifically attributed AI or deepfake incident was found, and none is asserted. Per the fabrication screen, no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the IPI and ARIPO pages; the Boletim da Republica; Mozambican media of record. Mozambique provides very limited public judgment access.
Mozambique renewed its copyright law in 2022 without reaching AI: the human intellectual creator holds the rights, patents run through ARIPO, the limitations are closed, and the AI strategy is still a draft.
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 industrial-property code treats the inventor as a natural person, and patents run nationally through the IPI or regionally through the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. No examination practice addresses AI-assisted inventions, and no DABUS-type filing has tested Mozambique.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingThe copyright law of 2022 vests copyright in the intellectual creator of the work, a human author, 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 limitations follow the closed enumerated model, 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 findingMozambique is a WIPO member and an ARIPO member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Mozambique 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 industrial-property institute, the copyright body or the regional office on examining AI-related filings was found. 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 draft AI strategy carries 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.
Mozambique is building the foundations of digital governance but has none of them finished for artificial intelligence. There is no AI law and no adopted AI strategy: a national AI strategy is in draft, in public consultation through mid-2026, and a comprehensive data-protection bill cleared the Council of Ministers in March 2026 but is not yet enacted, so the country still has no standalone data-protection statute. What binds is general law: an electronic-transactions law that carries the only real data-handling duties, the criminal code's informatic-crime provisions, and the intellectual-property regime, in which copyright was renewed in 2022 and patents run regionally through the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization. The copyright law confines authorship to the human intellectual creator. Mozambique is listed among the founders of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, but the membership is recorded as reported, since no Mozambican government source or named signatory was found. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific and data instruments are all still bills, that reported founding seat and the pending legislative pipeline are the profile's defining features.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Mozambique, 14 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. Mozambique's AI-governance footprint is thin, and the WAICO entry carries a caveat.
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