Senegal governs artificial intelligence through strategy, and it has two. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific instruments are two strategies, that early data-protection posture and the international footprint are the profile's centre of gravity.
The shape is an early adopter that leads with strategy: two AI-specific instruments in the soft tier, none in force, and a binding tier of general law an AI dispute would meet, with patents granted regionally.
Senegal's data-protection statute and the general law most likely to reach an AI harm, among the first in West Africa. Article 18 requires prior declaration of processing to the commission, and article 48 bars a decision producing legal effects on a person taken solely on automated processing intended to profile them. These are data-protection duties, not AI-specific ones.
Source: WIPO LexThe computer-crime law, the general penal instrument behind data and online offences. No AI-specific provision.
Source: WIPO LexThe telecommunications and electronic-communications framework, the general regime a networked AI service operates within.
Source: official gazetteThe authorship framework. Article 12 defines the author as the natural person who created the work, and the law carries no computer-generated-works provision. Its exceptions are a closed enumerated list with no text-and-data-mining exception.
Source: WIPO LexThe patent framework. Senegal has no national patent statute; patents are granted centrally by the African Intellectual Property Organization under the Bangui Agreement. The right to the patent belongs to the inventor, a natural person, and there is no AI-inventorship provision.
Source: OAPI; WIPO LexThe dedicated AI strategy, aligned with the emerging-Senegal plan and organized around research, capacity and adoption. Policy that creates no operator duties.
Source: government recordsThe governing digital agenda under the new administration, succeeding the earlier digital plan, with heavy investment and dematerialization targets and AI integration across public services. A policy and investment agenda, not a statute; no operator duties.
Source: presidence.sn; primature.snReported founding role; Senegal listed among the twenty-nine founders in reconstructed rosters, but not named in the official Chinese release and no Senegalese government confirmation found. Official source: Chinese and allied media roster.
Signatory, 11 Feb 2025; Senegal named among the African signatories. Official source: elysee.fr, the statement signatory list.
Adopted by the AU Executive Council July 2024; Senegal an AU member. Official source: au.int.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; readiness assessment completed and used to develop the AI strategy. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Senegal as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Senegal 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 two AI strategies low on the force axis, above a binding tier of general law, with patents granted regionally.
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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 Senegal, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Senegal has limited public judgment access, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported. One matter from the 2024 election period is recorded below as reported, not an adjudicated case, and per the fabrication screen no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the OAPI pages; the data-protection commission and the courts; Senegalese media of record. Senegal provides limited public judgment access.
Senegal runs a 2008 copyright law and OAPI regional patents: authorship and inventorship stay with natural persons, the exceptions are closed, and the two national AI strategies 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 findingPatents are granted regionally by the African Intellectual Property Organization under the Bangui Agreement, which vests the right to the patent in the inventor, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. No examination practice or guidance addresses AI-assisted inventions, and no DABUS-type filing has tested the regional office.
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 created the work, 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 exceptions are a closed enumerated list, 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 findingSenegal is a WIPO member and an OAPI member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Senegal 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 regional office or a national body on examining AI-related filings was found; industrial property is administered regionally. 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 law's automated-decision provision is not a disclosure duty, and the AI strategies are policy.
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.
Senegal governs artificial intelligence through strategy, and it has two. A national AI strategy to 2028, developed through the UNESCO readiness process, sits alongside the New Deal Technologique to 2034, launched by the new president in 2025 as the governing digital agenda. Both are policy and impose no operator duty. What binds is general law, and Senegal was an early West African adopter: a 2008 data-protection law with an independent commission and an automated-decision provision, the 2008 cybercrime law and the 2018 electronic-communications code, and the intellectual-property regime, in which copyright is national and confines authorship to a natural person while patents run regionally through the Bangui Agreement. Senegal is more internationally woven than most sparse peers, an early accession to the Council of Europe data-protection convention and a signatory of the Paris summit statement. Its place among the founders of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization is recorded as reported, since no Senegalese government source or named signatory was found. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific instruments are two strategies, that early data-protection posture and the international footprint are the profile's centre of gravity.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Senegal, 13 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. Senegal is more internationally woven than most sparse peers, a Paris signatory and an early data-protection-convention party; the WAICO entry carries a caveat.
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