AI regulation in Marshall Islands (2026)

The AI Asia Pacific Institute's August 2024 comprehensive study of all 16 Pacific Island countries found that no Pacific Island nation has an active national AI strategy, and that AI governance frameworks are absent across the region, with Marshall Islands included in this assessment.

The Nitijela (parliament) enacted four digital laws in 2025 — the Digital Transformation and Identity Verification Act, the Electronic Transactions Act, the Cybersecurity Act, and the Personal Data Protection Act — which together create an enabling digital-government framework but contain no AI-specific provisions.

The World Bank-financed Digital Republic of the Marshall Islands project underpins the government's digitalisation drive, focusing on citizen-centric service platforms, health records, and business registries — not AI governance.

The OECD-affiliated AI Policy Portal maintains a country page for the Marshall Islands but records no AI policy initiatives, strategies, or regulatory instruments, consistent with the country's absence from AI governance efforts.

The AI Asia Pacific Institute and the East Asia Forum have noted that Pacific Island states lack the technical capacity, regulatory infrastructure, and specialist personnel needed to develop or enforce AI governance, and have called for a Pacific Islands AI Technical Assistance Facility to address this gap.

A 2023 legislative framework assessment prepared for the Digital RMI project identified significant gaps in data privacy, intellectual property, consumer protection, and cyber-activity law — the foundational layers that would need to be in place before AI-specific rules could be built, confirming that AI regulation was not yet on the legislative agenda.