Venezuela has drafted an artificial-intelligence law and adopted an AI ethics code, and neither binds. For a jurisdiction with the most developed AI bill in its bloc and none of it in force, the gap between the draft and the statute book is the profile's defining feature.
The shape is a jurisdiction where the AI-specific instruments sit outside the binding tier entirely, a stalled bill and a voluntary code, while the binding tier is general law with a notable hole where a data-protection statute would sit, and a patent regime that predates the digital age.
The constitutional basis for personal-data protection in the absence of a statute: the right to access, know the use of, and seek correction or destruction of one's data held in public or private registries. The Supreme Tribunal reaffirmed it in 2025 and routed claims to the municipal administrative courts.
Source: Gaceta OficialThe e-government statute, mandating free software in public administration, open access to public documents and a national IT authority. General digital law with no AI-operator duty.
Source: Gaceta OficialThe principal content-control statutes reaching the online space, the first carrying heavy penalties for prohibited content and a takedown duty, the second extending broadcast content rules to electronic media. Technology-general, with no AI-specific provision.
Source: Gaceta OficialThe telecommunications framework and regulator, the general regime a networked AI service operates within.
Source: Gaceta OficialThe authorship framework. It vests rights in the author by the sole fact of creation and presumes authorship in the person named, presupposing a human author, and carries no computer-generated-works provision. Its limitations are a closed enumerated list with no mining exception.
Source: WIPO LexThe patent, trademark and design framework. When Venezuela denounced the Andean Community, the Andean Decision 486 ceased to apply and the industrial-property law of 1955 was restored, and no successor has been enacted. The inventor is treated as a natural person; the law predates artificial intelligence entirely.
Source: WIPO Lex; SAPIThe AI-ethics instrument, built on nine principles including humanism, equity, sustainability, security, privacy, transparency, accountability, open science and excellence. A national orienting instrument with no sanctions and no enforceable operator duties.
Source: MINCYTThe dedicated AI law, in draft. It would create a national AI agency to register providers, sort systems into risk classes up to an unacceptable tier on the European model, supervise and sanction, and would criminalize harmful non-consensual deepfakes. Its risk tiers, transparency duties and deepfake offences are drafted, not in force.
Source: Asamblea Nacional; MINCYTA long-circulating cyberspace bill that would create a national cyberspace centre and a presidentially appointed guarantor authority. It has never been enacted, and is recorded as a draft.
Source: civil-society analysis of the draftReported founding role; a Venezuelan delegation attended and voiced support in Shanghai on 16 Jul 2026, but no Venezuelan signature or founding-member statement of record was found. Official source: Chinese and allied media roster; Venezuelan state media reporting attendance.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; the 2026 national ethics code incorporates it by reference; no readiness assessment produced. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; applies to Venezuela as a UN member. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org.
Adopted by consensus in 2024, the second a China-led capacity-building resolution; Venezuela bound as a UN member; no co-sponsorship confirmed. Official source: UN records.
Strategic-partnership technology and digital cooperation; no standalone AI-specific joint statement isolated. Official source: bilateral communiques.
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 whose AI-specific instruments cluster high on specificity but low on force, a stalled bill and a voluntary code, above a binding tier of general law.
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 adjudicated court case where artificial intelligence is materially at issue was found in Venezuela, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists, since the deepfake provision sits in the draft AI bill. Venezuela has a politicized judiciary and limited public judgment access, so a non-public matter cannot be ruled out, but nothing is reported. Two matters from the 2024 election period 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 SAPI pages; the Supreme Tribunal jurisprudence pages; Venezuelan media of record. The Supreme Tribunal reaffirmed the habeas-data right in a 2025 ruling, but that concerns data access generally, not artificial intelligence.
Venezuela runs a 1993 copyright law and a 1955 patent statute revived after leaving the Andean Community: human authorship and inventorship, a closed limitations list, and the AI rules only in a stalled bill and a voluntary code.
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 of 1955 treats the inventor as a natural person, so an AI-assisted invention with a human inventor is open in principle while the machine cannot be named. The law predates artificial intelligence, no examination practice or guidance addresses AI-assisted inventions, and no DABUS-type filing has tested Venezuela.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingThe copyright law vests rights in the author by the sole fact of creation and presumes authorship in the person named, presupposing a human author, 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 limitations are a closed enumerated list, covering named lawful communications and reproductions such as domestic non-profit use, library preservation, software backup and educational use, 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 findingVenezuela is a WIPO member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Venezuela or SAPI, 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 SAPI on examining AI-related filings was found, and the patent regime is a 1955 statute with no digital-era practice. 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 transparency and deepfake duties that would reach operators exist only in the draft AI bill, and the 2026 ethics code is voluntary.
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.
Venezuela has drafted an artificial-intelligence law and adopted an AI ethics code, and neither binds. A fifty-seven-article AI bill that would create a national AI agency, sort systems by risk on the European model and criminalize harmful deepfakes passed a first reading in the National Assembly in November 2024 and stalled in second reading, so it is not in force. A non-binding AI ethics code followed in February 2026, guidance without sanctions. What binds is general law, and it is unusually thin: there is no comprehensive data-protection statute, so protection rests on the constitutional habeas-data right and court rulings; an e-government law and a set of content-control statutes govern the online space; and the patent regime is the industrial-property law of 1955, revived after Venezuela left the Andean Community in 2006. The copyright law of 1993 presupposes a human author and carries no machine-made-works provision. Venezuela is reported among the founders of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, but no signature of its own is on the record. For a jurisdiction with the most developed AI bill in its bloc and none of it in force, the gap between the draft and the statute book is the profile's defining feature.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Venezuela, 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. Venezuela's AI-governance footprint is mostly the UN-consensus and China-aligned tracks; the WAICO entry carries a caveat set out below.
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