Zambia governs artificial intelligence through strategy, not a binding AI law. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific instrument is a strategy, that international engagement and the confirmed founding seat are the profile's centre of gravity.
The shape is a sparse jurisdiction that leads with strategy: one AI-specific instrument in the soft tier, none in force, and a binding tier of general law an AI dispute would meet, recently refreshed on the cyber side.
Zambia's data-protection statute and the general law most likely to reach an AI harm. Its section 62 gives a right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, subject to carve-outs. The commissioner is operational and controller registration is under way. It is a data-protection right, not an AI-specific duty.
Source: parliament records; ZambiaLIIThe cybersecurity statute regulating security-service providers and critical information infrastructure. It replaced the combined 2021 act, splitting security from crime. Technology-general.
Source: ZambiaLIIThe computer-crime statute setting out content and cyber offences and online child protection, the criminal counterpart to the cybersecurity act. No AI or deepfake-specific provision.
Source: ZambiaLIIThe electronic-transactions framework and the regulator's remit, the enabling layer for electronic and AI-mediated dealings.
Source: ZambiaLIIThe authorship framework. The author is a human maker, and the one mention of a computer-generated work, in the moral-rights section, excludes such works from moral rights without defining them or assigning ownership, so the category is named but carries no protection rule. Its permitted acts are a closed enumerated list with no text-and-data-mining exception.
Source: ZambiaLII; WIPO LexThe patent framework. The inventor is the person who devised the invention, treated as a natural person, and there is no AI-inventorship provision. Zambia is an ARIPO member, so patents can also run through the regional route.
Source: ZambiaLIIThe flagship AI-specific instrument, establishing a National AI Council and technical working groups and setting pillars for human capital, infrastructure, data, research, sectoral adoption and international collaboration. It sets direction and creates no operator duties.
Source: the ministryThe whole-of-government digitalization roadmap that frames the AI strategy. No AI-specific duties.
Source: the ministry; SMART ZambiaConfirmed founding member; signed in Shanghai 16 Jul 2026 by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Technology and Science, Brilliant Habeenzu; Zambia among the twenty-nine founding states. Official source: Zambian state broadcaster (ZNBC); Prensa reporting.
Signatory, 11 Feb 2025. Official source: elysee.fr, the statement signatory list.
Adopted by the AU Executive Council July 2024; Zambia an AU member. Official source: au.int.
Adopted 2021, as a UNESCO member; a readiness assessment is under way. Official source: unesco.org.
Adopted by consensus 22 Sep 2024; Zambia a co-facilitator of the compact process, alongside Sweden. Official source: A/RES/79/1 annex, un.org; the co-facilitation record.
Adopted by consensus in 2024; Zambia bound as a UN member. 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 an AI-specific strategy low on the force axis, above a binding tier of general law that carries no AI specificity.
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 Zambia, and no dedicated deepfake offence with a citable article exists. Zambian judgments are published on the legal-information institute, so the search is reasonably firm, but nothing turning on AI was found and no Zambia-specific AI incident surfaced. Per the fabrication screen, no case number is invented.
Portals and sweeps: WIPO Lex and the PACRA pages; the ZambiaLII judgment database; Zambian media of record. The global wave of AI-fabricated-citation sanctions records no Zambian entry.
Zambia names the computer-generated work only to deny it moral rights, without ever saying who owns it: an orphaned term, a human-inventor patent law, closed fair-dealing, and no office machinery aimed at the question.
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 patents act defines the inventor as the person who devised the invention, treated as a natural person, 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 Zambia; patents may also run through the regional ARIPO route.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingThe copyright act confines authorship to a human maker, and its single reference to a computer-generated work excludes such works from moral rights without defining them or assigning ownership, so there is no route to protection for machine-made output. A human who directs an AI tool and contributes authorship can hold rights; purely AI-generated output has no qualifying author, and the point 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 permitted acts in section 21 are a closed enumerated list, narrowed further by a normal-exploitation proviso, 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 findingZambia is a WIPO member and an ARIPO member, but the WIPO Conversation submissions record shows no traceable submission from Zambia or PACRA, 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 PACRA 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 data act's automated-decision right is not a disclosure duty, and the AI strategy carries 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.
Zambia governs artificial intelligence through strategy, not a binding AI law. A National AI Strategy for 2024 to 2026, launched in November 2024, sets up an AI council and pillars for skills, infrastructure and adoption, but it is policy and creates no operator duty. What binds is general law: a data-protection act of 2021 with an automated-decision right and an operational commissioner, a pair of 2025 cybersecurity and cybercrime acts that replaced the 2021 regime, and the intellectual-property statutes, which confine authorship and inventorship to human makers. The copyright act names the computer-generated work only to deny it moral rights, without ever saying who owns it, an orphaned term rather than a route to protection. Zambia has taken a visible seat in the multilateral debate, co-facilitating the UN Global Digital Compact and signing the Paris summit statement, and it is a founding member of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, signed for by a ministry permanent secretary. For a jurisdiction whose AI-specific instrument is a strategy, that international engagement and the confirmed founding seat are the profile's centre of gravity.
The site does three things: it maps every instrument that governs AI in Zambia, 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. Zambia's standout credentials are a confirmed WAICO founding seat and a co-facilitation of the UN Global Digital Compact.
Know of a ruling or proceeding in Zambia where AI is central? Send a source link; it will be reviewed before publishing.
Submit a case