The ASEAN Law Forum 2026, themed “Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Lawmaking and Law Enforcement in the Digital Era,” was held in Hanoi from August 18-19 and hosted by Vietnam's Ministry of Justice.

The event brought together around 100 delegates, including senior legal officials and leaders from ASEAN member states and international partners, to discuss national sovereignty in AI applications, governance of public-sector cooperation within ASEAN, arbitration in the digital era, and human-centered approaches to AI adoption.

In his opening remarks, Deputy Prime Minister Le Tien Chau highlighted Vietnam's initial progress in applying AI to the legal sector: “The Prime Minister has approved the Project on Development of the National Legal Portal for the 2026-2030 period, establishing a unified access platform for legal data. The Prime Minister is directing the Ministry of Justice to accelerate the completion of the national legal database system and standards-compliant AI application tools, in line with the National Architecture Framework.”

CLEX – a legal AI assistant purpose-built for Vietnamese law

At the forum, CMC OpenAI presented CLEX, its legal AI platform powered by CMC-AI-Legal-32B, a large language model purpose-built for Vietnamese law and trained and fine-tuned in-house by CMC OpenAI's experts. The platform represents a concrete effort to contribute to the direction outlined above.

Designed to review the entire body of Vietnamese legal normative documents, identify conflicts and overlaps within the legal system, and assess compatibility with Party regulations as well as international conventions and treaties, CLEX is intended to support the Government in institutional and legislative development.

The platform draws on a centralized data source designed around four principles: Accurate, Complete, Clean and Live. It can help streamline administrative operations, reduce civil servants' workloads and improve the quality of public services. For enterprises, CLEX is designed to support regulatory compliance, protect legal rights and interests, and strengthen the legal preparedness needed for sound business decision-making.

Covering the entire workflow with advanced advisory capabilities

CLEX is designed to closely follow the actual workflows of civil servants and the legal compliance functions of enterprises, covering legal research, drafting, appraisal and conflict review. Its development draws on surveys of real-world operational processes conducted with support from a network of legal advisory experts.

With a repository of more than 2 million documents encompassing legislative, judicial and administrative data from official sources nationwide, CLEX provides legal advisory capabilities backed by citations that can be traced to the source documents currently in force.

This directly addresses one of the primary concerns of both civil servants and businesses: obtaining reliable legal information with verifiable sources. In doing so, the platform can substantially reduce workloads while improving operational efficiency and business performance.

A fully self-developed and validated Vietnamese legal language model

CMC OpenAI has developed CMC-AI-Legal-32B with full control over the technology, from training to fine-tuning, without relying on API calls to international foundation models.

This approach offers users three key benefits. First, response quality can be kept consistent and controlled because the model is specifically fine-tuned for Vietnamese legal terminology and document structures rather than relying on interpretations derived from general context.

Second, operating costs can be controlled at scale without exposure to fluctuations in third-party token pricing.

Third, data remains within national infrastructure, an important requirement for the public sector and enterprises subject to stringent compliance standards.

CLEX is among the few legal AI products in Vietnam to have been trained and systematically evaluated using V-LegalBench, a benchmark designed to assess an AI model's comprehension and reasoning capabilities in Vietnamese law. In testing involving 23 leading international AI models, CLEX's underlying large language model demonstrated strong performance on legal tasks requiring deep reasoning.

One platform serving individuals and the nation

The Government version of CLEX has been directly evaluated for product quality by Minister of Justice Hoang Thanh Tung, who confirmed that it meets the standards required for deployment on the National Legal Portal.

The Ministry has also introduced the platform to ministries and sectoral agencies for use in the comprehensive legal document review program running through the end of December this year.

Developed by CMC OpenAI, CLEX is also one of two AI platforms assessed as meeting the required standards and selected by the Ministry of Science and Technology to participate in a nationwide pilot for the comprehensive review of legal normative documents. The initiative supports the National AI Civil Service Platform serving civil servants and public employees nationwide.

CLEX remains under development, with versions for enterprises and individual users being prepared for launch.

Vietnam's hosting of the ASEAN Law Forum 2026 comes after the country enacted its Law on Artificial Intelligence in December 2025, making it one of the first countries in the world to adopt dedicated legislation governing the field. The move reflects Vietnam's proactive approach to developing a legal framework for AI technology while creating room for research cooperation and responsible applications of AI in the legal sector among ASEAN countries.

Speaking to the press on the sidelines of the forum, Dang Van Tu, SVP/CTO of CMC Corporation and CEO of CMC OpenAI, said: “We believe legal AI is more than the story of a single nation. To the international partners joining us at the Forum today, we look forward to exploring research collaboration and extending CLEX to other legal systems across the region.”

CMC OpenAI's participation in the ASEAN Law Forum 2026 marks a significant milestone in the development strategy of both CLEX and the company. Originally developed to address domestic needs, CLEX is gradually establishing a position within the region's legal AI ecosystem, where only a limited number of countries currently have purpose-built legal AI models.

The development also aligns with CMC OpenAI's long-term direction: moving CLEX beyond a standalone application toward becoming part of the digital infrastructure supporting lawmaking and law enforcement in Vietnam, while expanding research collaboration with academic and technology partners across ASEAN.