Saudi Arabia's New Copyright Law Lets AI Firms Train on Your Work Without Asking

12 August 2026 — not 1 August. That is the date Saudi Arabia’s new Copyright Law enters into force, and the 11-day discrepancy running through the professional commentary is not a rounding error. It is the difference between counting 180 days from the Royal Decree and counting them from the Official Gazette. The statute settles it in its penultimate line.

The Saudi Arabia copyright law 2026 reform replaces a statute that has governed the Kingdom’s creative economy for 23 years. But the provision that will matter most is not in the enforcement chapter. It sits mid-text, at Article 26, which permits reproduction of a published work — without the author’s permission and without any compensation — for the purpose of “developing artificial intelligence products and algorithms.”

That is one of the first express, standalone AI-training exceptions written into a national copyright statute anywhere, and it carries no rights-holder opt-out. It arrives in the same year the Public Investment Fund-owned AI company HUMAIN launched a 34-billion-parameter Arabic foundation model trained on what the Saudi Data and AI Authority calls the largest Arabic corpus ever assembled.

Almost everything published on this law so far is a client alert for corporate counsel. This piece is for the people the law acts upon — photographers, publishers, software vendors, streaming services, and the AI developers who now have a statutory defence they lacked before. It is legal information, not legal advice; anyone with a live exposure should take Saudi-qualified counsel.

Saudi Arabia Copyright Law 2026: What Changes on 12 August

Last verified: 31 July 2026.

When Does Saudi Arabia’s New Copyright Law Take Effect?

12 August 2026. The arithmetic is worth showing, because the conflict in the secondary sources is systematic rather than random, and it is the single most consequential fact on this page.

Article 61 of the Law — the final provision — reads:

يعمل بالنظام بعد (مائة وثمانين) يوماً من تاريخ نشره في الجريدة الرسمية

“The Law shall come into force 180 days after the date of its publication in the Official Gazette.” [S1]

The trigger is therefore publication, not issuance. Those are two different dates, separated by 11 days:

• Royal Decree M/169 is dated 14/08/1447 AH = 2 February 2026.
• Publication in Umm al-Qura occurred on 25/08/1447 AH = Friday 13 February 2026 [S2].

Count 180 days from the gazette date. Fifteen days remain in February after the 13th; March adds 31 (46); April 30 (76); May 31 (107); June 30 (137); July 31 (168). The 180th day falls 12 days into August. Commencement: 12 August 2026.

Now count from the decree date instead. Twenty-six days remain in February after the 2nd; the same monthly additions carry the total to 179 by 31 July. The 180th day is 1 August 2026.

The two published answers are separated by exactly the 11 days that separate the decree from the gazette. A&O Shearman gives 1 August while dating the enactment to 13 February — the gazette date — which is the fingerprint of the error [S5]. Reed Smith also gives 1 August and cites commencement as Article 60; in the gazetted Arabic, Article 60 is the implementing-regulations deadline and Article 61 is commencement [S6]. Baker McKenzie and Gowling WLG both give 12 August [S3][S4].

12 August is better supported. The Law’s trigger is publication, and only one publication date exists. Saudi practice on the identical formula also points the same way: the foreign property ownership law gazetted 25 July 2025 commenced 22 January 2026, exactly 180 days on. Readers with a compliance deadline should treat 1 August as the conservative date and 12 August as the legally correct one, and be ready by the earlier of the two.

What Does Article 26 Actually Say?

Article 26 is not one rule. It is a list of four permitted uses under a single chapeau that disposes of both permission and payment in one clause:

يجوز دون إذن المؤلف ودون تعويض، استخدام المصنف في الحالات الآتية

“A work may be used, without the author’s permission and without compensation, in the following cases.” [S1]

The four limbs are:

1. Private copying — an original work reproduced for purely personal use, by any means, provided it was lawfully published and the original copy lawfully owned. Architectural works embodied in buildings are carved out.
2. Education and non-profit research — a published work or parts of it used for teaching or non-commercial research, within the bounds of that purpose, with source and author cited.
3. Scientific illustration — drawings, photographs, designs and maps used inside a scientific work to explain its content, or in lectures and scientific conferences, limited to what the purpose justifies, with attribution.
4. Artificial intelligence — the provision that matters:

نسخ المصنف الأصلي لأغراض تطوير منتجات وخوارزميات الذكاء الاصطناعي بشرط أن يكون المصنف قد نشر بصورة مشروعة، وأن يكون الحصول على ملكية النسخة الأصلية بشكل مشروع، وأن يكون النسخ في حدود ما يلبي الغرض

“Copying the original work for the purposes of developing artificial intelligence products and algorithms, provided that the work has been lawfully published, that ownership of the original copy has been lawfully obtained, and that the copying is within the limits of what meets the purpose.” [S1]

Three conditions, then. Lawful publication. Lawful acquisition. Proportionality. Nothing about attribution — unlike limbs 2 and 3, the AI limb imposes no duty to name the author or the source. Nothing about commerciality either: the text does not distinguish research training from commercial model development, so on its face it covers both.

A fourth constraint sits outside Article 26 and applies to it. Article 37(1) subjects every exception in Articles 26 to 36 to the second and third limbs of the international three-step test: the use must not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work, and must not cause unjustified harm to the legitimate interests of rights holders [S1]. That is the hook on which any challenge to an AI-training claim will hang, and it is why law-firm summaries list five conditions where the Arabic of Article 26 lists three.

Does the New Law Allow AI Training on Copyrighted Work?

Yes, expressly — and this is the most consequential thing the statute does. The law is not silent on AI training. Silence would have been the ordinary outcome; most national copyright statutes are silent, which is why the question is being litigated from California to Delhi. Saudi Arabia legislated instead, and legislated permissively. Set it against the three regimes it most resembles:

The absence of an opt-out is the design decision. The EU’s Article 4 exception collapses the moment a publisher inserts a machine-readable reservation, which is why European news groups spent 2024 and 2025 building exactly that infrastructure. Under Article 26(4), a robots.txt directive or a terms-of-service prohibition does not by itself defeat the exception, because the exception is not conditioned on the rights holder’s consent.

The live condition is the second one: lawful acquisition. Scraping a subscription archive without a subscription is not lawful acquisition; buying the book, licensing the image library or subscribing to the feed is. The Saudi exception does not authorise piracy as an input — it authorises training on lawfully obtained material without further permission or payment.

What it means for HUMAIN, ALLaM and Saudi model training

The commercial logic is not subtle. ALLaM, the Arabic large language model developed by the National Center for AI at SDAIA, was built on a corpus assembled with 16 public entities and described by SDAIA as the largest Arabic training dataset in existence, at roughly 500 billion tokens. HUMAIN launched HUMAIN Chat on ALLaM 34B in 2025 [S10]. The scarce input in Arabic model development is not compute — the Kingdom’s data center build-out has addressed that — it is high-quality Arabic text, and most of the best Arabic text is copyrighted.

Article 26(4) converts a licensing negotiation into a statutory entitlement for anyone training inside the Kingdom on lawfully obtained material. Read alongside Saudi Arabia’s national AI strategy and SDAIA’s AI ethics principles, it completes a stack in which the Kingdom supplies power, chips, data-residency guarantees and now a training-data safe harbour. Whether that attracts foreign model developers or merely subsidises domestic ones is the open question.

One countervailing signal. In September 2025, under the old law, SAIP fined an individual SAR9,000 ($2,400) for using an AI tool to alter another person’s photograph and republish it — reported as the Kingdom’s first AI-related copyright penalty [S9]. That case concerned output, not training. Article 26(4) protects ingestion; it says nothing about whether an AI system’s outputs infringe, or whether they are themselves protectable.

Does the Law Let the Government Use Your Work Without Asking?

In a narrow and largely unchanged way, yes — but not through Article 26. Article 26 contains no government-use limb at all. The state-use provisions sit elsewhere and are modest:

• Article 30 permits public transmission of lectures, speeches and seminars delivered in open sessions at public authorities or at scientific meetings.
• Article 32 permits public authorities to communicate or perform a published work at official occasions, and educational institutions to do so at their own gatherings, or within the family — expressly conditioned on no direct or indirect financial return [S1].

Neither is an expropriation power; neither permits reproduction, adaptation or distribution. Both are performance and communication exceptions of a type found in the 2003 law and in most Berne-compliant statutes. There is no “public interest” trigger allowing a ministry to requisition a work, no compulsory licence for government publishing, and no compensation mechanism — because there is nothing to compensate for.

The genuinely novel provision is quieter, and no client alert has led with it. Article 37(2) reads:

يجوز في غير الحالات الواردة في المواد من (السادسة والعشرين) إلى (السادسة والثلاثين) استعمال الغير للمصنف دون إذن المؤلف ودون تعويض إذا كان الاستعمال غير تجاري، ولا يتعارض مع الاستغلال العادي للمصنف، ولا يلحق ضرراً غير مبرر بالمصالح المشروعة لأصحاب الحقوق

“Outside the cases set out in Articles 26 to 36, a third party may use the work without the author’s permission and without compensation if the use is non-commercial, does not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work, and does not cause unjustified harm to the legitimate interests of rights holders.” [S1]

That is an open-ended exception. It does not enumerate. It permits any non-commercial use by any person — including a public body — that survives two of the three test limbs. Most civil-law systems operate a closed list precisely to avoid this; Article 37(2) opens it. A rights holder’s recourse is a civil claim before the competent court, where the burden of showing conflict with normal exploitation or unjustified harm falls on the claimant. There is no notification requirement, no register of uses, and no administrative appeal against a state body’s reliance on it.

Does Article 26 Survive the Berne Three-Step Test?

This is contested, and the answer turns on a limb the Saudi statute did not import.

Saudi Arabia acceded to the Berne Convention on 11 December 2003, and the Paris Act took effect for the Kingdom on 11 March 2004 [S8]. It joined the WTO on 11 December 2005, bringing TRIPS obligations with it. Berne Article 9(2) permits reproduction “in certain special cases, provided that such reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author” [S11]. TRIPS Article 13 extends the formula to all exclusive rights [S12].

Article 37 reproduces limbs two and three almost verbatim. It does not reproduce limb one — the requirement that exceptions be confined to certain special cases. That omission is where the argument lives.

The case that it complies: the test binds states, not draftsmen, and nothing requires the first limb to appear in the statutory text. Article 26’s AI limb is arguably a special case — defined by purpose, bounded by two lawfulness conditions and a proportionality condition, and narrower on its face than Japan’s Article 30-4, which no WTO member has challenged in over seven years.

The case that it does not: the WTO panel in the 2000 US — Section 110(5) dispute read “certain special cases” as requiring an exception to be clearly defined and narrow in both quantitative and qualitative scope. An exception permitting wholesale reproduction of entire works for commercial model training, with no opt-out and no attribution duty, is hard to characterise as quantitatively narrow. Article 37(2) is harder still: an open-ended non-commercial exception is by construction not a certain case.

Neither provision is likely to be tested. Berne has no direct enforcement mechanism, and no WTO member has brought a TDM-exception challenge against any jurisdiction. The exposure is reputational rather than juridical — a real cost for a Kingdom that has spent a decade building intellectual property credibility as an investment argument, but not a legal one.

How Long Does Copyright Last in Saudi Arabia?

The author’s life plus 50 years. Article 22 of the 2026 Law preserves the term set by Article 19 of the 2003 statute [S7] — the Berne minimum, and 20 years short of the EU, UK and US standard of life plus 70.

Moral rights are treated more expansively than under the old law. Article 7 makes them perpetual, non-transferable and non-waivable, covering first publication, attribution or pseudonymity, objection to publication under another name, and objection to distortion prejudicial to the author’s reputation. On death they pass to the heirs rather than to the state, and an author may apply to the competent court to withdraw a work from circulation for serious reasons [S5][S6].

Two structural additions matter for anyone holding a portfolio. Registration with SAIP remains optional — copyright arises on creation — but Article 42 makes a registration prima facie evidence of ownership, rebuttable by contrary proof [S6]. And orphan works devolve to the General Authority for Guardianship over Minors’ Property rather than falling into limbo [S4].

What Are the Penalties for Copyright Infringement in Saudi Arabia?

Up to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of up to SAR1m ($266,000) under Article 47, doubled for a repeat offence within three years — so a ceiling of SAR2m ($533,000). Against the 2003 law that is a quadrupling of the maximum fine and a doubling of the custodial maximum.

The enforcement architecture changed more than the numbers. SAIP inspectors may conduct searches and receive complaints; the CEO may order premises closed for up to seven working days; confiscation and destruction of infringing copies and the equipment used to make them is mandatory, at the violator’s expense. SAIP may settle administratively for sums up to SAR2m, and a settlement is binding, final and extinguishes the criminal proceedings while preserving third-party damage claims. Criminal referrals go to the Public Prosecution [S4].

Civil remedies are codified separately and are materially stronger. Article 51 gives rights holders a damages claim that expressly includes the profits realised by the infringer — a disgorgement measure absent from the 2003 text — alongside seizure, cessation orders and disclosure [S5]. Claims run through the ordinary courts; the bench handling most commercial disputes is covered in our note on Saudi Arabia’s commercial courts.

How the 2026 Law Compares With the 2003 Copyright Law

What Publishers, Photographers and Vendors Must Do Before 12 August

The window is days, not months. A practical checklist, in priority order:

• Audit what you have licensed into Saudi Arabia. Any agreement whose value rests on controlling machine reading needs review now. Article 26(4) does not override a contract you have signed, but where no contract exists it removes the statutory backstop.
• Move protection into contract. Access controls, subscription terms and licence conditions restricting machine reading remain enforceable as contract even though they do not defeat the exception as a matter of copyright.
• Photographers and image libraries: register. Article 42’s presumption of ownership makes SAIP registration evidentially useful for the first time. Note that applied art carries a 25-year term and the boundary with photographic work is undefined in the statute.
• Software vendors: re-paper your EULAs. Article 12 makes licence terms enforceable subject to public order. Terms written for jurisdictions with different backup and reverse-engineering carve-outs should be checked against Article 33.
• Streaming services and UGC platforms: build the notice channel. The Article 49 safe harbour requires a mechanism for rights holders to report infringement and removal within a reasonable time. A platform without a working takedown route has no defence.
• Employers: check contracts before commencement. Works made by employees within the employer’s field of activity now vest in the employer; works outside it do not, and blanket assignments of future works remain void.
• AI developers: document provenance. Retain purchase records, licence receipts and crawl logs. A corpus with undocumented provenance cannot demonstrate lawful acquisition.
• Everyone: read the implementing regulations the day they appear. They should define proportionality under Article 26(4), work-for-hire scope, performers’ moral rights and the CMO framework.

Why This Matters for Vision 2030

Copyright is rarely where transformation programmes are won or lost, but this one sits between two Vision 2030 bets that pull in opposite directions.

The first is the creative economy. The Kingdom has spent heavily on a domestic content industry — the Saudi film sector, the gaming and esports build-out through Savvy Games Group, and the creative industries investment case the Ministry of Culture is mandated to grow. Every one depends on rights being worth something. A 50-year post-mortem term unchanged since 2003, and a training exception with no opt-out, are not the settings a mature rights market would choose.

The second is sovereign AI. Here the same provisions read as industrial subsidy: the cheapest way to close an Arabic-data gap is to make the data free at the point of ingestion. For a country whose AI ambition is constrained by corpus size rather than capital, Article 26(4) is a rational instrument.

The law does not resolve that tension so much as settle it in favour of the model builders, deferring the consequences to regulations unpublished as of 31 July 2026. The constituency served is not the creative sector Vision 2030 also promises to build. On how such instruments are sequenced, see how laws are made in Saudi Arabia and the record of regulatory reform under Vision 2030.

Risks, Contradictions and Open Questions

The date is settled on the text but not in the market. Two international firms have published 1 August and two have published 12 August. Until SAIP or the Bureau of Experts states a date publicly, some counterparties will operate on the earlier one.

The Arabic text used here came from a legal-text aggregator, not SAIP’s own portal. The Article 26, 32, 37 and 61 wording quoted above was cross-checked against four independent law-firm summaries and is consistent with all of them; the Umm al-Qura portal page for Cabinet Decision 560 confirms the decision number and the 25/08/1447 AH publication date but does not reproduce the article text [S2].

Article numbering is unstable across the secondary sources. Reed Smith cites commencement as Article 60; the gazetted text places commencement at Article 61 and the regulations deadline at Article 60. Where this piece quotes a number, it follows the Arabic.

The exception’s commercial scope is undetermined. Article 26(4) does not say “non-commercial” and Article 37(2) does — implying by contrast that Article 26(4) covers commercial training. That is a reading, not a ruling.

Outputs are unaddressed. Nothing states whether a model output reproducing protected expression infringes, or whether AI-generated material attracts protection. The September 2025 SAIP decision suggests output-side enforcement is live; the statute gives it no framework.

No opt-out means no negotiation. EU rights holders answered Article 4 with machine-readable reservations. There is no equivalent lever here, which removes the mechanism by which licensing markets normally form — even as Article 41 invites collective management organisations to exist.

What to Watch Next

• Before 12 August 2026 — publication of SAIP’s implementing regulations under Article 60. Read the proportionality definition under Article 26(4) and the Article 49 takedown timeline first.
• 12 August 2026 — commencement. Watch for a SAIP notice naming a date, which would end the 1-vs-12 August question definitively.
• Q4 2026 — first enforcement actions under the new penalties, and whether SAIP prefers the SAR2m administrative settlement route to criminal referral.
• 2027 — formation of the first collective management organisation under Article 41. Its repertoire and tariff schedule will show whether a licensing market forms despite the training exception.
• Ongoing — WIPO or WTO commentary on the AI exception, and whether other GCC states copy the Article 26(4) formula. Regional replication would make it a de facto Gulf standard.

Related Vision 2030 Context

• Intellectual property protection in Saudi Arabia — patents, trademarks and SAIP’s institutional role. That page owns the general IP framework; this one covers the 2026 Copyright Law and Article 26 specifically.
• Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law — the parallel regime governing personal data inside training corpora.
• SDAIA and the national data authority — the body behind ALLaM and the Kingdom’s data governance architecture.
• NDMO data governance policies — data classification rules that sit alongside copyright for in-Kingdom training.
• Saudi data privacy and cyber compliance — the parallel compliance stack for AI developers.
• Saudi Arabia’s foreign investment law — the framework governing foreign-owned publishers and platforms.
• The foreigners’ property ownership law — the closest recent precedent for Article 61’s 180-day formula.
• Vision 2030 overview — the programme framework within which the IP reform sits.

Sources

• [S1] Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Copyright Law (نظام حقوق المؤلف), approved by Cabinet Decision No. 560 of 27 January 2026 and issued by Royal Decree No. M/169 of 14/08/1447 AH — Arabic statutory text, articles 22, 26, 30, 32, 37, 47, 59, 60, 61. https://qanoonsa.com/p/514448/
• [S2] Umm al-Qura Official Gazette, Approval of the Draft Copyright Law (الموافقة على مشروع نظام حقوق المؤلف), Cabinet Decision No. 560, published 25/08/1447 AH (13 February 2026). https://www.uqn.gov.sa/decisions-and-regulations/4000303
• [S3] Baker McKenzie, Saudi Arabia: New Copyright Law Modernises KSA IP Framework, client alert, July 2026. https://www.bakermckenzie.com/en/insight/publications/2026/07/saudi-arabia-new-copyright-law-modernises-ksa-ip-framework
• [S4] Gowling WLG (Bachir Chakra, Muath Alghamdi, Renad Alhumaidi Al-Harbi, Sarah Batarfi), Saudi Arabia Copyright Law 2026: Key Changes and What Businesses Need to Know, client alert, 2026. https://gowlingwlg.com/en/insights-resources/articles/2026/saudi-arabia-copyright-law-2026
• [S5] A&O Shearman, Saudi Arabia’s New Copyright Law: Key Changes and Implications, client alert, 2026. https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/saudi-arabias-new-copyright-law-key-changes-and-implications
• [S6] Reed Smith (Jamie Ryder, Alex Mackay), New Saudi Copyright Law — Legislating for the Future, client alert, 2026. https://www.reedsmith.com/our-insights/blogs/viewpoints/102mikv/new-saudi-copyright-law-legislating-for-the-future/
• [S7] WIPO Lex, Copyright Law of Saudi Arabia, Royal Decree No. M/41 of 2 Rajab 1424H (30 August 2003), as amended by Council of Ministers Decision No. 536 of 19 Shawwal 1439H (3 July 2018) — legislation record. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/legislation/details/19412
• [S8] WIPO, Berne Notification No. 227 — Accession by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (deposited 11 December 2003; in force 11 March 2004, Paris Act 1971). https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/treaties/notifications/details/treaty_berne_227
• [S9] Saudi Gazette, SR9,000 Fine for Copyright Infringement Using AI, news report, September 2025. https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/654940
• [S10] Saudi Press Agency, HUMAIN Launches HUMAIN Chat, Powered by ALLaM 34B, official statement. https://www.spa.gov.sa/en/N2385004
• [S11] WIPO, Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Paris Act 1971, Article 9(2) — treaty text. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/283698
• [S12] World Trade Organization, Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), Article 13 — Limitations and Exceptions. https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_04_e.htm