The Complete Guide to Using AI as a Legal Professional in Taiwan in 2025

Taiwan's 2025 landscape asks legal professionals to move quickly from curiosity to competence: the National Science and Technology Council's July 2024 draft AI Basic Act, the Ministry of Digital Affairs' new AI evaluation framework and even sectoral sandboxes (eg, FinTech and unmanned vehicles) mean regulators are building rules while courts and agencies keep pace - the Judicial Yuan's AI sentencing system (launched 6 Feb 2023) already illustrates how AI is reshaping litigation practice and research.

Yet core legal questions remain settled by existing regimes: the PDPA governs biometrics and data use, IP rulings treat AI outputs cautiously, and liability still flows to people and makers rather than machines.

For lawyers advising clients on contracts, procurement, privacy or generative-AI risks, practical upskilling is urgent; start with a grounded roadmap like the Taiwan AI practice guide from Chambers (Chambers: Artificial Intelligence 2025 - Taiwan practice guide) and consider hands-on courses such as Nucamp's Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus (15-week bootcamp) to learn prompts, tools and workflows that keep legal advice current and defensible.

What counts as “the new AI law” in Taiwan in 2025 is less a single rulebook than a scaffolding: the Executive Yuan passed its version of the AI Basic Law draft on August 28, 2025 and the Legislative Yuan's committee finished intense negotiations on August 21, 2025, marking real momentum toward a horizontal, principle‑led statute that will set national priorities while leaving technical rules to ministries and subordinate legislation.

The draft - championed by the Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) after a controversial February 26 transfer of lead responsibility - frames AI around human‑centred principles (innovation balanced with rights), a forthcoming risk‑classification regime, and government action on computing, data and talent rather than creating a single, new “AI authority.” Critics worry about transparency and MODA's capacity, and the process has featured lively moments such as a 4.5‑hour cross‑party committee negotiation and calls for a child impact assessment; follow the detailed timeline and Executive Yuan updates at the Taiwan AI Basic Act timeline and Executive Yuan updates (Taiwan AI Basic Act - timeline and Executive Yuan updates) and the broader legal context in the Chambers Taiwan AI practice guide (Chambers - Taiwan Artificial Intelligence 2025 practice guide).

For lawyers, the takeaway is practical: the Basic Act will set principles and a risk framework, but compliance will arrive through industry‑specific rules, evaluation centres and subordinate laws - so contract clauses, PDPA review and sectoral risk mapping must move from theory to checklists now.

"This AI Basic Act is Taiwan's AI constitution for the next 10 years, advocating development priority, equitable sharing, valuable data opening, and investment encouragement, ensuring Taiwan doesn't lose its way or fall behind in the global AI competition."

The Taiwan draft AI Basic Act is best read as a high-level scaffold for practical governance rather than a prescriptive rulebook: published by the NSTC as an 18‑article draft, it lays down seven core principles - sustainable development, human autonomy, privacy and data governance, security and safety, transparency and explainability, fairness/non‑discrimination and accountability - and directs the government to promote talent, data openness, regulatory sandboxes and industry‑specific oversight while charging the Ministry of Digital Affairs with building a risk‑classification framework that interfaces with international standards; for a concise summary of the bill's missions and principles see the K&L Gates briefing on the NSTC draft and the Chambers Taiwan practice guide for how those principles map into sectoral duties and the AI evaluation regime.

The draft's practical bite comes from provisions that ask ministries to review and revise their own rules (Article 17 territory), so legal teams should treat the Act as a roadmap to forthcoming subordinate laws - think risk mapping, tighter procurement and new contract clauses - rather than a final compliance checklist, and prepare to advise clients while the ministries write the technical rules.

“Early communication with stakeholders is crucial.”

Taiwan's AI strategy is big-picture and boots-on-the-ground at once: the government has pledged to turn the island into a global AI hub by 2040, pairing an ambition to generate roughly T$15 trillion in economic value with concrete infrastructure and talent targets - think three international labs, mass retraining, and regional “six‑region” rollout plans - details captured in the national blueprint to become a global AI hub (Taiwan national AI strategy 2040) and the NT$200 billion “AI New Ten Major Construction” funding framework that channels money into sovereign computing, smart‑city platforms, and silicon photonics labs (NT$200 billion AI New Ten Major Construction plan).

The plan stitches together three application domains (industry AI adoption, smart cities, digital living circles), three core techs (silicon photonics, quantum, robotics), and a public‑private push on sovereign computing - a vivid example being Foxconn's southern‑Taiwan supercomputer project - so legal work will soon need to map procurement, data governance and sectoral compliance onto an expanding national stack rather than a single statute.

“AI can help us develop new solutions more quickly and efficiently, becoming another key engine for economic growth.”

Taiwan's AI story in 2025 is a mix of clear strengths and hard limits: world‑class foundry and packaging leadership - above all TSMC's near‑monopoly on advanced data‑center logic chips - gives local firms a massive edge in supplying the compute that powers LLMs, while a deep ASIC and design services ecosystem (MediaTek, GUC and rising turnkey houses) helps translate that silicon into products; see why TSMC is called the linchpin of data‑center AI in the detailed analysis of TSMC's role (TSMC King of Data‑Center AI analysis).

That industrial muscle shows up in concrete metrics - Taiwan accounts for roughly 90% of global AI server shipments and is building the advanced packaging and HPC stack that generative models demand - yet important gaps remain: memory (HBM/DRAM/flash) is largely outside TSMC's production, power and capacity constraints (TSMC alone uses an appreciable share of the island's electricity), and geopolitical and supply‑chain concentration risks mean legal teams must advise clients on contingency, export control and procurement clauses as much as on PDPA and IP. The upside is clear: Taiwan's semiconductor backbone and cross‑industry partnerships position it to commercialize generative AI quickly, but sustainable growth depends on moving further into chip design, system integration and resilient supply chains (Taiwan generative AI advantages: driving generative AI innovation), so lawyers should map those technical strengths onto contract, liability and procurement playbooks now.

“ChatGPT the “iPhone Moment” for AI.”

Data protection is central to any AI practice in Taiwan: the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) - most recently amended on May 31, 2023 - already stretches across government and private actors and raises the stakes for legal advice by boosting administrative fines (now up to NT$15,000,000 in the most serious cases) and preserving criminal exposure (including possible imprisonment for intentional harms), so counsel must treat contracts, procurement clauses and vendor due diligence as active risk controls rather than boilerplate; for a concise overview of the PDPA's scope, rights (access, portability, correction, erasure), and enforcement framework see the Chambers data‑protection guide and the practical amendment summary at DLA Piper, and consider vendor solutions that map PDPA Articles to automated workflows like those described by Securiti.

Key practice points: ensure privacy notices meet PDPA content rules at first collection, map cross‑border transfers (some sectors still restrict transfers to China/HK/Macau), build incident response and breach notification playbooks (no strict numeric threshold but prompt notice is required), and monitor the PDPC roll‑out (the independent Personal Data Protection Commission is due to take centralized enforcement in 2025) because sectoral rules and draft AI guidance will layer extra obligations on top of the PDPA - in short, document data flows, limit data to what AI models need, and bake breach and vendor clauses into every AI contract now.

Intellectual property in Taiwan is already a live courtroom and contract issue for generative AI: the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office's explanatory letters (eg, Dec 12, 2022 and Mar 17, 2023) and the IPO's June 16, 2023 interpretation make two practical points legal teams must factor into advice and deal drafting - training models on unlicensed artworks can reproduce copyrighted content and risk infringement, while pure AI outputs that lack human creative input ordinarily receive no copyright protection, and works that merely imitate an artist's “style” may not themselves be infringing; see the TIPO guidance and discussion in the Lexology briefing on the Taiwanese artist protest (Lexology briefing: TIPO explanatory letters and Taiwanese artist protest) and the detailed IPO interpretation of June 2023 explaining reproduction and authorship questions (Taiwan IPO interpretation on generative‑AI copyright (LeetSai)).

Because TIPO/IPO views do not bind courts, and Taiwan has not yet seen major AI copyright rulings, counsel should draft layered licences, express training‑data permissions, and human‑in‑the‑loop attribution clauses now; artists are already fighting back with measures such as Glaze or PhotoGuard to block scrapers and a Tainan exhibitor publicly refusing to “tutor” AI, a vivid reminder that technical, contractual and reputational controls travel together - for broader practitioner context see Lee & Li's roundup of Taiwan's evolving IP stance on AI (Lee & Li roundup: Governing AI and IP in Taiwan).

“Using copyrighted works to train AI models may infringe the copyright holder's 'reproduction right.'”

Sectoral rules and regulatory sandboxes are where Taiwan's AI policy becomes concrete for legal teams: the FinTech Sandbox Act and the Unmanned Vehicle Sandbox Act create controlled safe‑harbours that let firms trial novel models and autonomous systems (think Kaohsiung's Cubot ONE AMR pilot) with temporary exemptions from some licensing and liabilities - but only after competent‑authority approval and with careful limits on what can be deployed outside the sandbox, so counsel should treat sandbox entry as a compliance‑critical project rather than a free pass (see the Chambers Taiwan AI practice guide for the sandbox framework and sectoral duties).

Parallel to those sandboxes, the Ministry of Digital Affairs' AI Product and System Evaluation initiative and the emerging AI Evaluation Center aim to standardise testing, labelling and evaluation tools that will feed the MODA risk‑classification regime; recent MODA action restricting DeepSeek in government agencies shows how information‑security concerns can trigger immediate agency measures and why procurement and cyber clauses must be reviewed early.

Practical lawyering: bake PDPA, procurement and liability allocations into sandbox applications, document testing histories and validation, and map any sandbox results to contractual transition plans so clients can move from experiment to regulated service with their legal exposure controlled (see MODA press release and NTUT summary of the AI Evaluation Center for evaluation details).

Practical lawyering in Taiwan means turning the PDPA's broad duties into a short, repeatable playbook: start by mapping data flows and updating first‑collection privacy notices so they meet PDPA content rules (identity, purpose, retention, rights) and make consent language for minors clear and comprehensible (ICLG Taiwan PDPA chapter overview); next, bake data‑minimisation and purpose‑limitation into AI specs and contracts so models receive only what they need and sensitive data triggers explicit consent.

Contractual must‑haves include express training‑data licences, vendor supervision and audit rights (the PDPA treats consignees as subject to the consignor's obligations), clear breach and transition clauses, and indemnities tied to compliance failures.

Operationally, build a tested breach playbook (some industries must report material incidents to regulators within 72 hours) and automate Data Subject Request handling and mapping wherever possible - vendor tools can streamline DSR, portability and breach workflows (Securiti guidance for PDPA automation in Taiwan).

Even where a DPO is not mandatory, appoint a responsible privacy lead, document decisions and retention rules, and run tabletop exercises: a single serious security lapse can draw administrative fines up to NT$15,000,000 and even criminal exposure, so preparedness isn't optional.

Finally, treat cross‑border transfers and sandbox pilots as legal projects - identify sectoral restrictions (notably specific limits to China/HK/Macau in some rules), tie sandbox results to contractual migration plans, and keep an issues log so technical strengths translate into defensible, auditable workflows rather than regulatory risk.

As Taiwan moves from draft to decision - committee reviews have cleared the AI Basic Act draft and it's now in plenary - legal teams must pivot from high‑level principles to concrete, repeatable workflows: map client AI uses to the NSTC‑backed principles and MODA's forthcoming risk‑classification regime, bake training‑data and vendor supervision clauses into procurement and sandbox applications, and watch TIPO and PDPA precedents for copyright and privacy traps.

For a practical, article‑by‑article read of the bill's current status consult Dr. Ju‑Chun Ko's legislative analysis (Dr. Ju‑Chun Ko legislative analysis of the AI Basic Act), and for cross‑sector legal playbooks see the Chambers Taiwan practice guide (Chambers Taiwan AI 2025 practice guide - cross‑sector legal playbooks).

Remember that the national stack is already real - examples like TAIDE (built on the TAIWANIA‑2 supercomputer) show local LLMs will ingest court opinions and regional languages, so counsel must treat data provenance and explainability as deal‑level items.

Upskilling is essential: practical courses such as Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work help turn high‑level risk concepts into prompts, audits and vendor checklists that protect clients while enabling innovation (Nucamp AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration).

“Only through cooperative implementation by the Legislative Yuan and various government departments can Taiwan demonstrate its ability to give the world “Taiwan Speed” through law, standing out in the AI era!”