Uzbekistan built a binding artificial-intelligence framework in the space of six months, then left intellectual property outside it. The country's synthetic-media problem is real and visible in deepfake fraud, but it is met through general law and public warnings rather than a labeling duty, which appeared in the draft AI law and did not survive into the enacted text.
The shape of the set is worth naming: Uzbekistan now has binding AI-specific duties, a first among the strategy-led states, but they govern how AI is used in decisions and data, not who owns what AI makes. The intellectual-property statutes sit in the binding tier only as general law that predates the question.
The AI-specific binding instrument, cast as an omnibus amendment to the Law on Informatization and the Code on Administrative Liability. Its new Article 7-1 provides that information resources and systems built with AI must not harm a person's life, health, freedom, honor, dignity or inalienable rights, and that a legally significant decision affecting rights and freedoms may not rest exclusively on the conclusions of an AI system. The administrative code gains a fine of 50 to 100 base units, with confiscation, for unlawful processing of personal data using AI. It contains no labeling or watermarking duty, and no provision on intellectual property.
Source: lex.uz/ru/docs/8011377A registered normative act, binding rather than voluntary, setting mandatory ethical principles for every organization and specialist working with AI: legality, priority of human interests, transparency, accountability, fairness and non-discrimination, data protection and safety. It carries the specific rule that AI may not be the sole basis of decisions in rights-affecting matters and in healthcare, including diagnosis and treatment selection.
Source: lex.uz doc 8083233The general statute for information resources and systems and the host now carrying the AI duties inserted in January 2026. Its Article 7-1 is the operative home of the no-sole-reliance and harm-prevention rules.
Source: lex.uzThe data-protection statute an AI system meets when it processes personal data. A 2021 amendment required the personal data of Uzbek citizens to be stored on servers in the country; a March 2026 amendment narrowed that localization duty to biometric, genetic and telecom-user data, allowing other data abroad under adequate-protection safeguards. Unlawful AI processing of personal data is now the administrative offence added by the AI law.
Source: lex.uzThe framework statute for cybersecurity and critical information infrastructure, naming the state security service as the authorized body. Not AI-specific, but it governs the infrastructure AI systems run on.
Source: lex.uz/en/docs/6997403The programmatic AI framework: 2030 targets for the AI software market, for AI-powered public services and research laboratories, and for the country's standing in a government AI-readiness index, with an action plan, an interest-free loan facility, and the creation of a Center for the Development of AI and the Digital Economy. A strategy that sets programs and targets, not operator duties.
Source: lex.uz/en/docs/7159258The first AI policy act, an acceleration and pilot program that launched AI use cases in public administration, introduced AI in higher education, and established the country's AI research institution. Superseded as the umbrella framework by the 2024 strategy, and included as the origin point of the institutional build-out.
Source: lex.uzThe national digital-transformation strategy covering e-government, the IT park and digital infrastructure. Its relevance to AI is enabling rather than direct: it seeded the data and services layer the later AI-specific acts build on.
Source: lex.uz/docs/7008256Founding signatory; signed Shanghai, 16 Jul 2026, by the Minister of Digital Technologies. Official source: Uzbek state news agency naming the co-founder status and the signatory; China State Council release.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; national readiness assessment launched in Tashkent 20 Aug 2025. Official source: unesco.org readiness-assessment announcement.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Uzbekistan as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Summit-level political commitments
Adopted by consensus 25 Jul 2025, a Tajikistan-led initiative; Uzbekistan among the consensus. Official source: UN records; Tajikistan foreign ministry statement.
15 May 2026 summit, themed on AI and digital development; Uzbekistan a party and proponent of a digital corridor. Official source: turkicstates.org declaration; official Uzbek coverage.
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 here is a country whose AI-specific instruments have crossed into binding force, unlike the older strategy-led picture, while intellectual property stays untouched.
Tap a marker
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 court judgment turning materially on artificial intelligence was found in Uzbekistan, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. What the record holds is a cluster of reported deepfake-fraud incidents, each with an official warning, but none traced to an adjudicated matter or a case number. Three are recorded below as reported, and the honest empty result follows. Per the fabrication screen, no case number is invented, and three cross-border matters that surfaced in searches, from Kyrgyzstan and Russia, were screened out as not Uzbek.
Portals and sweeps: lex.uz and WIPO Lex; the public court portal, which is not open to full-text search; and Uzbek media of record (Gazeta.uz, Kun.uz, Spot.uz, UzDaily, Daryo). Bilingual queries in Russian and Uzbek for deepfake prosecutions, AI copyright registration and biometric-falsification cases returned incidents but no judgments.
Uzbekistan's new AI law governs decisions and data, not rights: authorship and inventorship stay with natural persons, the free-use list is closed, and no filing asks whether AI was involved.
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 industrial-property object to a natural person whose creative labour made it, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine itself cannot be named. No examination practice, guidance or grant evidence specific to AI-assisted inventions exists, and no DABUS-type filing has tested Uzbekistan.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingA human who directs an AI tool and contributes creative labour can hold copyright under the author definition, but there is no AI-specific rule and no registration practice to confirm it, so the position is untested. Purely AI-generated output has no route to protection: the author is defined as a natural person, and the copyright law carries no provision for a work with no human author. Commentary aligned with the IP office reads such output as neither a copyright object nor eligible for deposit.
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 free-use provisions are a closed and purpose-specific list, covering named uses such as private study, quotation and library or judicial reproduction, 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 findingUzbekistan is a WIPO member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions archive shows no traceable submission from Uzbekistan 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 dedicated guidance from the IP office on examining AI-related filings was found. The office's AI-related activity is operational, aimed at using AI to speed its own examination, not at guiding how AI-originated filings are treated. 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 enacted AI law forbids sole reliance on AI in significant decisions and penalizes unlawful AI data processing, but carries no marking or provenance duty; the labeling clause that appeared in the draft did not survive into the enacted text.
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.
Uzbekistan built a binding artificial-intelligence framework in the space of six months, then left intellectual property outside it. Since January 2026 a law amending the informatization statute forbids resting a legally significant decision on artificial intelligence alone and makes unlawful AI processing of personal data an administrative offence, and since June 2026 a registered order binds every organization working with AI to a set of ethical rules. None of this reaches copyright or patents. Those statutes predate the question: the author and the inventor must be natural persons, there is no provision for a work a machine made, and no exception lets a model train on protected works. The country's synthetic-media problem is real and visible in deepfake fraud, but it is met through general law and public warnings rather than a labeling duty, which appeared in the draft AI law and did not survive into the enacted text.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Uzbekistan, 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. Partner and observer statuses never become party status.
Know of a ruling or proceeding in Uzbekistan where AI is central? Send a source link; it will be reviewed before publishing.
Submit a case