Despite the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) across multiple sectors, its deployment generates significant risks for human rights, exacerbates structural inequality, and produces outcomes of limited predictability. These dynamics make the development of robust ethical and legal governance frameworks both urgent and complex. Uzbekistan adopted Ethical Rules for the development, deployment, and use of AI-based solutions in 2026, marking an important step in national regulatory development. Yet questions of implementation, understood here as the formal incorporation of normative principles into binding legal instruments and the establishment of institutional enforcement mechanisms, remain largely unresolved. This paper employs a comparative legal analysis method, grounded in soft law theory and legal transplant theory, to examine how Uzbekistan's emerging AI governance framework aligns with international standards, including UNESCO's 2021 Recommendations, the OECD Principles on AI, and the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act. The analysis identifies six structural gaps in Uzbekistan's current framework and proposes a pathway from declaratory principles toward enforceable, institutionally supported standards. The paper contributes to the emerging literature on AI governance in transitional legal systems and to broader debates on the conditions under which soft law instruments can effectively constrain technological risk.

Artificial intelligence governance, soft law, legal transplant

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