Tajikistan has a national artificial-intelligence strategy but no law that binds an AI operator. For a jurisdiction with no binding AI law of its own, that resolution is the profile's centre of gravity.
The shape is a sparse jurisdiction that leads with policy: an AI strategy sits in the soft tier, a dedicated AI law is only contemplated, and the binding tier is general law an AI dispute would meet. The distinctive weight sits in the regional band, where Tajikistan authored the region's AI resolution at the United Nations.
Tajikistan's data-protection statute, setting the basis for collection, processing and protection of personal data, with controller duties and subject rights and administrative and criminal backing. The statute most likely to govern an AI or data harm.
Source: national legislation centerThe framework for information rights, information security and protection of information resources. Content-control exposure in practice runs through this together with the criminal and administrative codes, not any AI-specific provision.
Source: Ministry of Economic Development and TradeEstablishes the legal recognition and evidentiary status of electronic documents and signatures, the enabling layer for any AI-mediated transaction.
Source: national legislation centerThe general statute for information systems, technologies and networks and the rights of participants, the framework an AI system operates within.
Source: Ministry of Economic Development and TradeThe general penal law behind data and content breaches, through computer-crime, unlawful-access and fraud provisions and administrative fines. No deepfake-specific offence exists, so AI-enabled fraud is charged under the general provisions.
Source: national legislation centerThe two intellectual-property statutes. The copyright law defines the author as a natural person; the inventions law confines inventorship to a natural person whose creative labour created the invention. Neither addresses artificial intelligence.
Source: WIPO LexThe flagship AI instrument and the first national AI strategy in the region. It targets AI at up to five per cent of output by 2040, prioritizes smart-region development, education and e-government, directs AI faculties across universities, and contemplates a future Law on Artificial Intelligence. It tasks state bodies and creates no private-operator duties.
Source: e-government portalThe umbrella digital-transformation policy for infrastructure, e-government, e-commerce and the data economy, the strategic parent of the later digital instruments. No enforceable AI duties.
Source: policy repositoryThe master socio-economic framework, built on preventiveness, industriality and innovativeness, that the AI strategy serves under its accelerated-industrialization goal. No AI-specific duties.
Source: Ministry of Economic Development and TradeThe dedicated AI law the strategy contemplates, to define the basis of state regulation of AI. It is an announced intention rather than a circulating bill, with no draft located, so Tajikistan has no binding AI statute unlike some neighbours.
Source: the 2040 strategyInitiated by Tajikistan; adopted by consensus 25 Jul 2025; operative text notes the initiative to establish a regional AI centre in Dushanbe. Official source: UN records; the resolution text.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Tajikistan bound as a UN member; no co-sponsorship claimed. Official source: UN records.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Tajikistan as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; no readiness assessment produced. Official source: unesco.org.
Summit-level political commitments
Reported founding member, signed 16 Jul 2026; not named in official sources and no national acknowledgment found. Official source: China State Council release; reconstructed roster.
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 an AI-specific strategy 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 Tajikistan, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Tajikistan has a controlled information environment and 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 patent-information centre pages; the national legislation centre; Tajik media of record. Tajikistan provides essentially no public court-judgment access.
Tajikistan's statutes date from 1998 and 2004 and are not being amended for AI: human makers only, a closed free-use list, and the movement on AI sits in policy and at the United Nations, not in intellectual property.
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 inventions law confines the author of an invention to a natural person whose creative labour created it, 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 Tajikistan.
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 whose creative labour created 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 free-use provisions are a closed enumerated list, covering named purposes such as personal, educational, scientific and informational use, 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 findingTajikistan is a WIPO member, joined in 1994, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Tajikistan or its patent-information centre, 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 patent-information centre 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 2040 strategy flags weak IP regulation as a challenge but is a policy document with 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.
Tajikistan has a national artificial-intelligence strategy but no law that binds an AI operator. The Strategy for the Development of AI to 2040, adopted by government resolution in 2022 and widely described as the first of its kind in Central Asia, sets a target of drawing five per cent of national output from AI by 2040 and contemplates a future AI law, but it is a policy document that creates no duties. What binds is general law: a 2018 data-protection statute, the information and electronic-document laws, and the criminal and administrative codes. The intellectual-property statutes confine authorship and inventorship to human makers. Where Tajikistan stands out is abroad: it initiated the UN General Assembly resolution on artificial intelligence for Central Asia, adopted by consensus in 2025, whose operative text names the initiative to establish a regional AI centre in Dushanbe. For a jurisdiction with no binding AI law of its own, that resolution is the profile's centre of gravity.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Tajikistan, 16 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. Tajikistan's standout credential is a UN resolution it authored; the WAICO entry carries a caveat set out below.
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