On June 9, 2026, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and the Civil Service Commission (CSC) jointly issued Memorandum Circular No. 003, Series of 2026 — the Philippine government’s first formal, government-wide framework governing how its own agencies can develop, deploy, and use artificial intelligence. The circular applies broadly: every national government department, bureau, and agency, every constitutional body, and every government-owned or controlled corporation is covered, and it takes effect immediately once its publication requirements are satisfied.
Rather than a detailed technical rulebook, the JMC is built as a principles-based framework, setting expectations around fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, and security for any AI system a government office deploys — everything from an AI-powered citizen chatbot to internal fraud-detection tooling to AI-assisted document processing. Covered agencies are required to stand up real oversight mechanisms as part of complying, including internal governance committees responsible for reviewing and approving AI use within their own organizations, rather than leaving individual offices to adopt AI tools with no formal review at all. DICT and CSC are separately mandated to issue detailed implementing guidelines within 90 days of the circular taking effect, which is where the specific technical and procedural requirements agencies will actually have to follow are expected to be spelled out.
The Part That Reaches Beyond Government: Private AI Vendors
The circular’s most consequential detail for the private sector isn’t really about government agencies at all — it’s about who those agencies are allowed to buy AI systems from. Agencies are expected to ensure that any third-party AI provider they contract with meets the same governance, accountability, and data-protection standards the circular sets for government’s own AI use. In practice, that means a private company selling an AI product to any Philippine government office — a local government unit’s chatbot vendor, a national agency’s AI-assisted case-management system, a state university’s AI research tool — is likely to face procurement requirements tied directly back to this framework, even though the JMC’s text is formally addressed to government employees, not private vendors.
This builds on top of, rather than replaces, the National Privacy Commission’s existing guidance on AI and personal data. The NPC issued advisory guidelines in December 2024 on how the Data Privacy Act applies to AI systems processing personal data, and followed up in April 2026 with more specific guidance on data scraping of publicly available personal information — a practice increasingly central to how AI models get trained. Between the NPC’s privacy-focused guidance and DICT-CSC’s new governance framework, the Philippines now has two real, separate regulatory threads converging on the same basic question: what does responsible AI use actually require, in writing, from any organization — public or private — that touches Filipino citizens’ data through an AI system.
Built on a Process That Started Two Years Earlier
The June 2026 circular wasn’t drafted overnight. DICT and CSC ran a public stakeholder consultation on an earlier draft of the same JMC as far back as 2024, gathering input from government offices, industry groups, and civil society before the final version was issued this year — a genuinely deliberative process rather than a rushed response to any single incident. It also arrives against the backdrop of DICT’s broader AI push: the department’s State of the Nation in AI (SONAI) event in January 2026 brought together government, industry, academe, and startup leaders specifically to turn AI policy discussion into practical action, and the June circular is one of the clearest concrete outputs of that push so far — a real, binding document rather than another position paper or roadmap.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
For any Philippine startup building AI products with an eye toward government contracts — GovTech, civic-tech, e-governance tools, or AI systems for LGUs and national agencies — this circular is the first concrete signal of what procurement will actually demand going forward, and it’s worth reading closely well before the 90-day implementing guidelines land. A startup that can already point to real internal AI governance practices — documented fairness and bias review, a clear accountability chain for AI decisions, demonstrable data-protection compliance — has a genuine, near-term competitive advantage bidding into government contracts once agencies start actually enforcing this against their vendors, rather than scrambling to build that governance story after a losing a bid to a competitor who already had it. More broadly, this is also a signal to the wider Philippine AI startup ecosystem that government is moving from talking about AI policy — the DICT’s State of the Nation in AI event earlier this year, industry consultations, position papers — toward actually writing binding rules. Founders building anything AI-adjacent should expect the next 12 to 18 months to bring more formal Philippine AI regulation, not less, and treat documented governance practices as an investment that pays off with both government buyers and increasingly AI-literate private investors alike.
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