Venice's own rule now names AI where last year's version did not

The shot

The regulations for the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, organised by La Biennale di Venezia and held on the Lido from 2 to 12 September 2026, state in Article 2 that the festival's aim is to promote international cinema 'in all its forms - as art, entertainment and industry - including works created with the contribution of Artificial Intelligence.' That clause does not appear in the equivalent Article 2 of the prior year's 82nd edition regulations, which describe the festival's aim without any reference to AI. Both documents are La Biennale's own, and both open the same way: an organisational statement, followed by the criteria for the Official Selection.

What the documents show

The 83rd edition's regulations establish, in the festival's own words, that a film's eligibility for Official Selection is not excluded because AI contributed to its making. The document does not add a disclosure requirement, a labelling rule, or a category limited to AI-made work; it revises the general statement of purpose that frames every article that follows it, including the Official Selection eligibility criteria. Comparing the two PDFs side by side is the only way to see the change, since neither edition frames it as a policy announcement, and the clause sits inside routine competition rules rather than a standalone statement.

The workflow

A production or sales team preparing a submission to Venice can read the current regulations and confirm that AI-assisted work is not, on this text, disqualified from the sections the general clause governs. The rest of the eligibility criteria continue unchanged: world premiere status, no prior distribution, and run-time thresholds remain in force regardless of any AI contribution. Because festival regulations are reissued for each edition, a submitting production should check the regulations for the specific edition it is entering rather than rely on a prior year's document.

What the tool does not change

The clause is a statement of scope, not a review of any single film's use of AI, and it does not describe how selectors weigh that use in choosing what screens. It says nothing about disclosure to audiences, credit, consent from performers whose likeness might be involved, or the copyright status of AI-assisted material, questions governed by whatever law and contract apply to the production, not by this festival document. This is an editorial reading: the regulations describe eligibility, not a certification that AI use meets any ethical or legal standard.

• Does the edition of the Venice regulations you are reading match the year you are submitting to?
• Does the general eligibility clause on AI affect any section-specific rule elsewhere in the same document?
• Have consent, credit and copyright questions around any AI-assisted material been resolved independently of festival eligibility?

Read next to each other, the two editions show a festival adjusting its own boilerplate language a year at a time rather than issuing a considered AI policy, a distinction worth preserving when this clause is cited as evidence of a Venice position on artificial intelligence.