On 26 August 2026, Singapore's Ministry of Law and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore jointly opened a public consultation on adapting Singapore's intellectual property laws to artificial intelligence. The consultation is at the public consultation stage; submissions close at 5 PM on 22 October 2026. The consultation paper is directed at IP right holders, AI developers, deployers, and researchers.
The consultation paper addresses four areas under existing Singapore IP statutes. First, it examines copyright authorship under the Copyright Act 2021 (Singapore Act 22 of 2021), asking whether AI-generated works should attract copyright protection and who should hold the initial right. Second, it examines inventive step doctrine under the Patents Act (Cap. 221), asking whether that doctrine requires adjustment where AI makes a material contribution to an invention. Third, it raises liability for AI systems that reproduce protected works during model training or in generated output. Fourth, it asks whether design registration under the Registered Designs Act (Cap. 266) adequately covers AI-generated aesthetic outputs.
AI developers training models on Singapore-hosted data must assess whether their training data practices create copyright liability under the current statute, which contains no explicit training data exception. Patent applicants whose R&D pipelines use AI to assist invention must evaluate whether the inventive step doctrine's current formulation in Singapore creates prosecution risk. Content publishers and database owners whose works are used in AI training without a licence should consider filing a consultation submission by the 22 October 2026 deadline.
The consultation paper proposes no draft legislation and imposes no binding obligations at this stage. The Ministry of Law and IPOS have not published a timeline for implementing any changes resulting from the consultation. Singapore's approach will likely be measured against the EU AI Act's provisions on AI-generated content and the UK Intellectual Property Office's parallel AI and IP consultation. The Delhi High Court's 2026 ruling that news agency content used for AI model training falls prima facie within fair dealing under Indian copyright law offers a divergent comparator that respondents may reference.
Licentium advises AI developers and intellectual property right holders on regulatory engagement, training data compliance, and IP strategy in the Asia-Pacific region. Work we undertake includes AI training data licence reviews, patent prosecution strategy for AI-assisted inventions, copyright ownership structuring for generative AI outputs, and regulatory consultation submissions.