Myanmar has no law written for artificial intelligence and no adopted AI policy. For a jurisdiction with almost no AI-specific law of its own, the profile rests on the regional and international instruments that bind it as a member of ASEAN and the United Nations.
The shape of the set is what a sparse jurisdiction looks like: no AI-specific instrument binds anyone, the AI-specific text that exists is an unadopted draft, and the profile leans on the regional band. What would decide an AI dispute in Myanmar tomorrow is general criminal, cyber and intellectual-property law, reached by analogy.
The general electronic-transactions statute, whose 2021 amendment added a data-protection chapter and new offences. Its section 38(c) criminalizes creating or spreading online disinformation intended to cause public panic or a loss of public trust, punishable by one to three years. Not AI-specific, but the most likely charge for harmful synthetic content today.
Source: Myanmar Law LibraryA control regime over digital platforms and cybersecurity services. It requires prior approval to provide virtual private network services, licenses digital platforms with a hundred thousand or more users and expects local incorporation, imposes data-retention and disclosure duties, and gives content-control and national-security powers. Technology-neutral rather than AI-specific, but it governs the platforms AI reaches users through.
Source: firm analysis (Tilleke, Allen and Gledhill)The general criminal basis for online content and fraud. Its section 505A, added in 2021, criminalizes spreading false news or incitement against the State, up to three years, and the defamation and public-mischief provisions remain in use. No deepfake-specific offence exists; synthetic-media conduct would be charged by analogy under these provisions.
Source: Burma LibraryThe telecom licensing statute. Its section 66(d) criminalizes using a telecommunications network to defame or coerce, up to three years, and has been heavily used against online speech. The licensing regime is the backbone of network and internet-service control.
Source: primary law via Myanmar Law LibraryThe only privacy-titled statute. It requires consent for the disclosure of personal data, but several of its core protective sections have been suspended since 2021, so it functions weakly and is not a comprehensive data-protection regime. The country has no general data-protection statute.
Source: Global New Light of MyanmarThe four modern IP statutes, on copyright, patents, trademarks and industrial designs, that replaced colonial-era law. Trademark registration opened in April 2023, copyright registration in early 2024, and the patent system in mid-2024, with no patents granted yet. None addresses artificial intelligence; they carry the human authorship and inventorship rules the AI-IP section reads.
Source: WIPO LexThe digital-economy direction-setter, successor to the 2019 roadmap. It references drafting a digital-governance master plan and national AI strategies and mentions AI among enabling technologies, but sets no operator duties.
Source: Digital Watch ObservatoryThe e-government plan, which encourages data-driven decision-making through analytics and AI. Policy guidance rather than a duty-creating instrument.
Source: Digital Watch ObservatoryThe country's only AI-specific text, in drafting across several ministries, organized around proposed pillars for AI governance and ethics, industry, research, talent, ecosystems and infrastructure. No adopted text and no duties.
Source: state media reportingAdopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; no national readiness assessment produced. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Myanmar as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Myanmar bound as a UN member; no co-sponsorship claimed. Official source: UN records.
Endorsed 2024 and expanded January 2025, as an ASEAN member; non-binding. Official source: asean.org.
Reported founding member, signed 16 Jul 2026; not named in the official Chinese release, corroborated by regional reporting and a prior bilateral statement of intent. Official source: Regional reporting; China-Myanmar joint statement of Jun 2026.
17 Jun 2026; records cooperation on the digital economy and AI, and Myanmar welcoming the WAICO initiative. Official source: PRC and Myanmar foreign-ministry texts.
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 jurisdiction whose binding instruments are all general law, low on AI specificity, and whose only AI-specific text sits 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 Myanmar, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Myanmar has no open court-judgment database, and the post-2021 judiciary publishes little, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported. Two matters from the information environment are recorded as reported incidents, not adjudicated cases, and per the fabrication screen no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the IP office pages; Myanmar has no public court-judgment repository, and the IP office publishes no decisions; reputable Myanmar-focused media (Myanmar Now, The Irrawaddy, Frontier Myanmar, Mizzima) were swept for reported incidents.
Myanmar's 2019 intellectual-property laws became operational only between 2023 and 2024, and none of them speaks to AI: human makers only, closed exceptions, and no machinery 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 Patent Law frames the inventor as the human maker of the invention, named with a nationality and address, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. The patent system took effect only in 2024 and has granted nothing yet, with a handful of applications published, so there is no examination practice and the AI-assisted question is entirely untested.
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 a natural person who creates a work through their own intellect, 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. The registration system is about two years old and voluntary, and no AI-work registration or ruling is known, so the position 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 list, covering named uses such as private study, quotation, education, library reproduction and news reporting, 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 findingMyanmar is a WIPO member, joined in 2001, but the WIPO Conversation submissions archive shows no traceable submission from Myanmar 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 guidance from the IP office on examining AI-related filings was found. The office is newly operational, having opened copyright registration in early 2024 and patent filing in late 2024, and its published materials cover basic filing procedure only. 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. Filing requirements are the standard bibliographic ones, and no AI-specific or content-provenance rule exists in any statute.
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.
Myanmar has no law written for artificial intelligence and no adopted AI policy. What governs is general law, and much of it is the law of content control: an electronic-transactions statute that criminalizes online disinformation, a 2025 cybersecurity law that licenses large platforms and restricts virtual private networks, and penal and telecommunications provisions long used against online speech. The intellectual-property system is new, the four 2019 statutes having become operational only between 2023 and 2024, the patent office has granted nothing yet, and none of the statutes addresses AI. Legislation since February 2021 is issued by the State Administration Council, the military body that administers the country, and a national AI strategy has been in drafting since 2025 without adoption. For a jurisdiction with almost no AI-specific law of its own, the profile rests on the regional and international instruments that bind it as a member of ASEAN and the United Nations.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Myanmar, 15 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. Myanmar is administered by the State Administration Council, and in some fora its representation is contested; this is noted where relevant. The WAICO entry carries a caveat, set out below and in the sources.
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