Benin

Benin has not enacted a binding statute imposing an affirmative AI-transparency or output-labeling duty (a duty to disclose that content is AI-generated, to label or watermark synthetic output, or to disclose that a user is talking to a bot).

It does have an outright prohibition adjacent to that question: the Digital Code's Article 576 criminalizes publishing an unauthorized montage of a person's words or image on the internet unless it is evident that it is a montage or this is expressly stated, which functions as a labeling-linked safe harbor for synthetic or manipulated media of a real person rather than an affirmative labeling mandate.

Benin's Council of Ministers adopted a Stratégie Nationale d'Intelligence Artificielle et des Mégadonnées (SNIAM) 2023-2027 on 18 January 2023, a published policy document organized into four programs covering the deployment of AI use cases in priority sectors (education, health, agriculture, and others), human-capacity building, support for training and research, and an AI-and-big-data governance framework; one governance action proposes creating a controlled environment for AI-initiative development grounded in Articles 406 to 408 of the Digital Code, which are the code's prior-declaration and prior-authorization provisions for certain categories of personal-data processing, but none of the strategy's programs states a specific, binding transparency or content-labeling duty on a developer or deployer, and no numbered bill, Journal Officiel citation, or public draft legal text implementing it was located.

Benin's existing binding statutes touching AI-adjacent activity address other duties too: the Digital Code's Article 401 bars a decision that produces legal effects for a person, or otherwise significantly affects them, from resting solely on automated processing, including profiling, and gives the person a right to know and contest the logic behind such a decision, but that is a data-subject right within the personal-data regime the Digital Code's Livre V creates, rather than a content-labeling duty.

As of 2026, Benin has named a Minister for Digital Transformation and Innovation with responsibility for the national AI strategy, reported in secondary coverage as a step toward a dedicated ministry for AI governance.

Benin's comprehensive personal-data statute is Livre V (Protection des Données à Caractère Personnel) of Loi n°2017-20 portant Code du Numérique en République du Bénin, adopted by the National Assembly on 13 June 2017 and promulgated on 20 April 2018, repealing the country's first data-protection statute, Loi n°2009-09 du 24 mai 2009.

It applies to collection, processing, transmission, storage, and use of personal data by a natural person, the State, local governments, and other actors, carries a heightened regime for sensitive categories (racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religion or beliefs, trade-union membership, genetic data, biometric data used to uniquely identify a person, health data, and sexual life or orientation data), and bars a legal-effect or significantly-affecting decision from resting solely on automated processing, including profiling, while giving the affected person a right to know and contest the underlying logic.

A controller must notify the country's data-protection authority and the affected person without delay of any security breach affecting personal data, and processing a child's personal data in connection with an information-society service offered directly to them requires the child's own consent from age sixteen or a parent's or guardian's consent below that age.

Cross-border transfer requires the Autorité de Protection des Données Personnelles (APDP), the independent administrative authority the law creates, to find that the destination country or organization assures a level of protection equivalent to Benin's own.

Enforcement combines administrative sanctions the APDP can pronounce directly, including a two-tier pecuniary fine capped at 50,000,000 CFA francs for a first violation and 100,000,000 CFA francs (or 5% of turnover, itself capped at that same figure) for a repeat violation within five years, with a private right of action letting a data subject seek damages for the harm suffered.

Livre V itself carries a dedicated criminal-infractions chapter (Art. 460-461) reaching unauthorised processing, processing without required formalities or security measures, unlawful collection, unauthorised cross-border transfer, and disregard of a data subject's rights, punishable by six months' to ten years' imprisonment and a fine of 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 CFA francs (a negligent formalities failure alone draws a fine only, 5,000,000 to 50,000,000 CFA francs), and Livre VI elsewhere in the Code adds standalone criminal offenses for using personal data to deceive people into disclosing further data or to embezzle funds.

Open-web crawling of public pages carries no dedicated Beninese statute.

The applicable authority for unauthorized-access questions is Livre VI, Titre I, Chapitre III of Loi n°2017-20 portant Code du Numérique en République du Bénin, which criminalizes intentionally and without right accessing or remaining present in all or part of a computer system (Art. 507), with an aggravated penalty where the access is accompanied by fraudulent intent, exceeds an authorized level of access, results in data being suppressed or modified, or is committed in violation of the system's security measures; no located Beninese court decision construes how authorization is read for a public, unauthenticated page.

The same Livre separately exempts a search-engine or indexing provider from liability for its search results, and an online host from liability for content stored at a user's request, each conditioned on the provider not originating, selecting the recipient of, or modifying the content in question (Art. 505 and 506), which bears on an aggregator or crawler's own exposure rather than on the underlying access question.

No statute or case law addressing terms-of-service enforceability (browsewrap versus clickwrap), or whether login or acceptance of terms changes the legal picture, was located; ordinary contract-formation principles under Beninese civil law would be the applicable general law for a contract-formation question, but this is unsettled rather than a specific regime.

Copyright protects a database only as a compilation, never through a separate sui generis right: Loi n°2005-30 du 05 avril 2006 protects a collection of works, folklore expressions, or simple facts or data, including encyclopedias, anthologies, and databases, as a protected work when the selection, coordination, or arrangement of its contents constitutes an intellectual creation (Art. 8), while excluding official texts, the news of the day, and bare ideas, facts, or data from copyright protection outright (Art. 9).

Personal-data reach over scraped public personal data is governed by Loi n°2017-20's Livre V, researched in full under the privacy topic; its scope provisions carry no publicly-available-data exemption beyond a narrow one for sensitive-category data the person has manifestly made public, so ordinary personal data scraped from a public source remains within the regime's reach.

No specific unfair-competition or misappropriation doctrine addressed to scraping, and no case law or regulatory statement giving robots.txt legal weight or addressing AI-training-specific access rules, was located.

Benin has no press-publisher neighbouring right, no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code, no recognized hot-news misappropriation doctrine distinct from ordinary copyright law, and no located statute or case law addressing hyperlinking or framing liability specifically; each of those dimensions is a sourced absence rather than an unresolved question.

The relevant instrument is Loi n°2005-30 du 05 avril 2006 relative à la protection du droit d'auteur et des droits voisins, which excludes the news of the day and bare ideas, facts, or data from copyright protection outright (Art. 9), so a bare fact or news item is never protectable regardless of who first reported it.

The same Law lets the press, broadcasting, and television, without needing the author's authorization but subject to naming the author and source, reproduce for informational purposes political, economic, or socio-cultural articles and public speeches delivered at political, judicial, administrative, or religious gatherings, provided the reproduction right has not been expressly reserved by the rights holder (Art. 16), and separately lets a photographer, filmmaker, or broadcaster record, reproduce, and communicate to the public works encountered while covering a current event, to the extent justified by the informational purpose (Art. 17).

Neither exception is capped at a headline-length or short-extract threshold, the Art. 16 exception is not confined to the press industry, and no reported Beninese decision applies either to a systematic news aggregator as opposed to a traditional press outlet.

The Law predates the concept of a machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservation, so no opt-out mechanism of that kind exists either, though Art. 16's own express-reservation proviso functions as an author-side reservation mechanism for the press-reproduction exception specifically.