Discussions about artificial intelligence in Latin America are often framed as a normative question: how should it be regulated? While necessary, that question is insufficient. As Brazil seeks to turn AI into an agenda of digital sovereignty and technological diplomacy, Colombia and Bolivia face the challenge of ensuring that the debate is not reduced to laws or strategies lacking real state capacity. For these countries, the issue is not only legal but political: how to govern a technology developed outside the region, controlled by major platforms, and sustained by infrastructures that few Latin American states command.
Brazil appears to have understood earlier than many of its regional peers that AI is now part of foreign policy, digital sovereignty, and the competition for technological autonomy. Its experience should not be seen as a finished model, but rather as a warning: in the new political economy of artificial intelligence, those who fail to build internal capabilities end up regulating decisions made by others.
Artificial intelligence is no longer merely about innovation or productivity. The United States, China, and the European Union are competing over standards, infrastructure, data, talent, and computing power. Each regulates from a different position of strength: the United States through its corporate ecosystem, China through state and industrial capacity, and the European Union through its regulatory and market influence. Latin America, by contrast, regulates from a far more vulnerable position, dependent on external platforms, cloud services, and technological architectures.
For this reason, adopting European regulatory language on risk management or transparency may be useful, but it does not solve the asymmetry between those who produce technology and those who can only adopt or supervise it. Brazil offers a particularly relevant case because it attempts to connect industrial policy, foreign policy, and digital governance.
In 2024, the Brazilian government proposed an artificial intelligence investment plan worth 23 billion reais aimed at strengthening national capabilities, developing socially oriented technologies, and reducing dependence on imported tools. The plan includes applications in healthcare, agriculture, education, environmental protection, infrastructure, and public services. The point is not that Brazil has achieved technological sovereignty. No Latin American country currently competes with the major AI powers. The difference lies in the fact that Brazil frames artificial intelligence as a matter of national power and international positioning. The issue is not merely the adoption of laws or ethical principles, but rather determining what role the country seeks to play within a global technological architecture that is reshaping value chains, state capacity, security, education, labor markets, and diplomacy.
Brazil’s agenda also links digital sovereignty to its role within the BRICS and strengthens its South-South cooperation strategy. From this perspective, AI is not simply a technology that requires domestic regulation but a field in which countries seek influence, bargaining power, and greater autonomy vis-à-vis technological superpowers.
Colombia occupies an intermediate position. In 2025, it approved CONPES 4144, a national artificial intelligence policy designed to strengthen research, development, adoption, and the ethical and sustainable use of AI systems. The policy recognizes AI’s potential to address social, economic, and environmental challenges and represents an important step forward because it establishes priorities and acknowledges the need for public governance of AI.
However, the question remains whether public policy alone is sufficient to build technological power. Colombia continues to rely heavily on external infrastructure, imported models, and private platforms. The challenge is not only to adopt AI but also to transform public policy into genuine capabilities across government, academia, the productive sector, and technological diplomacy.
Bolivia illustrates a different challenge: the risk of regulating before developing sufficient capacity for implementation. In 2025, the Bolivian Senate approved Bill 178/2024–2025 on the promotion, management, and use of artificial intelligence, which is currently under review in the Chamber of Deputies. The initiative seeks to create an ethical and transparent framework for AI and to establish a national strategy. Yet legislation can carry considerable symbolic value while producing limited material impact if it is not accompanied by technical capacity, infrastructure, high-quality public data, specialized talent, and well-resourced authorities. In countries with less developed digital infrastructure, the danger is the emergence of a gap between regulation and reality: rules that promise control over systems that the state is unable to audit or supervise.
The comparison between Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia helps organize the debate across three levels. Brazil seeks to place AI within the realm of foreign policy and digital sovereignty. Colombia has developed a roadmap but must translate it into effective capabilities. Bolivia has begun the legislative process but faces the challenge of ensuring that regulation does not become a declaration lacking institutional strength.
The regional lesson is clear: Latin America needs regulation backed by capacity, regional cooperation, domestic infrastructure whenever possible, and technological diplomacy when isolated national autonomy is unattainable. This requires thinking in terms of smart public procurement, interoperable data systems, specialized talent, algorithmic auditing, negotiations with technology providers, and regional partnerships.
In this context, holistic methodologies such as Z-Inspection®, an evaluation process for trustworthy artificial intelligence systems, together with the expertise of Tech4Peace as a specialized partner, can help reduce strategic dependence and information asymmetries vis-à-vis AI providers. This partially changes the relationship of dependence. Local actors cease to be merely users and begin acting as informed supervisors, thereby strengthening regulatory sovereignty and state capacity.
Machine translation, proofread by Ricardo Aceves.
Autor
Associate Professor at Universidad de La Sabana (Colombia). PhD in Law and Political Science from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Salamanca.
Associate Professor at the University of La Sabana (Bogotá). PhD from the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). His areas of interest are business ethics, digitalization, and the role of the private sector in conflicts in Latin America.
