Oman governs artificial intelligence through policy, not law. For a jurisdiction with no binding AI law of its own, that confirmed founding seat is the profile's centre of gravity.
The shape is a sparse jurisdiction that leads with policy: two AI-specific instruments sit in the soft tier, no dedicated AI law exists or is tabled, and the binding tier is general law an AI dispute would meet. The distinctive weight sits in the regional band, where Oman holds a confirmed founding seat in the new AI cooperation organization.
Oman's data-protection statute, supervised by the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology. It requires express written consent for processing, imposes controller duties including a data-protection officer, breach notification and cross-border-transfer controls, and grants data-subject rights. It carries no provision on solely-automated decision-making, so it reaches AI harms only through its general processing and consent rules. The statute most likely to govern an AI or data harm.
Source: official gazette; MTCITThe general computer-crime law, covering electronic fraud, forgery of electronic data and privacy violations. It defines artificial intelligence in its definitions article but imposes no duty to label or disclose AI-generated content; its technology-neutral forgery offence can reach a deepfake used to defraud, charged as electronic forgery rather than under any AI-specific provision.
Source: Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs gazetteEstablishes the legal recognition and evidentiary status of electronic records, contracts and signatures, the enabling layer for any AI-mediated transaction.
Source: official gazetteThe framework for the telecommunications and internet sector under the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, the general regime a networked AI service operates within.
Source: official gazette; TRAThe authorship framework. It defines the author as the natural person who creates the work and carries no computer-generated-works provision, and its exceptions are a closed enumerated list. No AI-authorship rule.
Source: WIPO LexThe patent, trademark and design framework. The right to a patent belongs to the inventor, treated as a natural person, with employer defaults for service inventions. No AI-inventorship provision, and no AI examination practice.
Source: WIPO LexThe flagship AI policy, setting direction for adoption across government and the economy. It states expressly that it is not a legally binding document and will not impose concrete obligations on the providers or deployers of AI systems, so it tasks and guides rather than binds.
Source: MTCIT and the ITA portalThe AI-ethics policy for government, the private sector and academia, built on principles of justice, transparency, human oversight, safety and data quality. Its evaluation and oversight mechanisms are described as at an early operational stage, and it creates no enforceable operator duty.
Source: MTCITThe national development framework and its digital-transformation track, the strategic parent of the AI policies and the diversification agenda they serve. No AI-specific duties.
Source: Oman Vision 2040 Implementation Follow-Up UnitConfirmed founding member; signed 17 Jul 2026 in Shanghai by the MTCIT Undersecretary for Communications and Information Technology; Oman named among the twenty-nine founding states. Official source: Oman Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement; Muscat Daily.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; readiness assessment completed and released March 2026. Official source: unesco.org; the Oman readiness report.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Oman as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Oman bound as a UN member; no co-sponsorship confirmed. Official source: UN records.
Sub-regional coordination
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 AI-specific policy 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 Oman, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Oman has essentially no public court-judgment database, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported. Two matters are recorded below as reported, neither an adjudicated court case, and per the fabrication screen no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the MOCIIP intellectual-property pages; the Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs gazette; Omani media of record. Oman provides essentially no public court-judgment access.
Oman's royal decrees of 2008 confine authorship and inventorship to human makers, the exceptions sit in one closed list, and the AI policies in effect do not reach the intellectual-property questions.
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 law vests the right to a patent in the inventor, treated as a natural person, with employer defaults for service inventions, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. No examination practice, guidance or grant evidence specific to AI-assisted inventions exists, and no DABUS-type filing has tested Oman.
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 the natural person who creates the work, so a human who directs an AI tool and contributes authorship 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 exceptions are a single closed enumerated list, covering named purposes such as quotation, non-commercial educational and family use, library reprography, press reporting, a backup copy of a computer program and temporary broadcast recordings, 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 findingOman is a WIPO member and a party to the main IP treaties, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Oman or its intellectual-property authority, 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 Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion 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 two national AI policies flag transparency as an ethical principle but carry no operative content-provenance rule, and the information-technology-crimes law imposes no labeling duty.
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.
Oman governs artificial intelligence through policy, not law. Two national AI policies are in effect, a National Artificial Intelligence Policy of August 2024 and a General Policy for the Safe and Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence Systems of April 2025, and both are deliberately non-binding: the first states in terms that it will not impose concrete obligations on the providers or deployers of AI systems. What binds is general law: a Personal Data Protection Law fully in force since February 2026, a new Information Technology Crimes Law of 2026, the electronic-transactions and telecommunications statutes, and the intellectual-property laws, which confine authorship and inventorship to human makers. Where Oman stands apart from its sparse peers is its international posture. It is one of the twenty-nine founding member states of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, and unlike most of the founding roster that membership is confirmed in Oman's own official record, named signatory and all. For a jurisdiction with no binding AI law of its own, that confirmed founding seat is the profile's centre of gravity.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Oman, 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. Oman's standout credential is a founding seat in the AI cooperation organization that is confirmed in its own official record, named signatory and all, rather than merely reported.
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