They may seem like colorful, even esoteric, stories: the panic over an \u201cunleashed\u201d AI that, evading the control of its corporate masters, carries out various cyberattacks by breaching hostile computer systems. This stands in contrast to the U.S. government\u2019s until very recently promoting AI autonomy for harassment and even the eventual taking of human lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, at the beginning of this year, the Pentagon urged contracting companies to sign onto a revised protocol that imposed restrictions on the use of AI models intended both for the mass surveillance of populations and for granting them operational autonomy in military interventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n For having rejected the proposal and insisted on maintaining the protocol, Anthropic was sanctioned by the Secretary of Defense, who at the end of February 2026 decided to classify the corporation as a \u201csupply chain risk entity,\u201d canceling any prospects for future public contracts. At that point, several leading companies explicitly expressed their solidarity: Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, in July, it became known that Anthropic and OpenAI, while training systems to neutralize hostile cyber threats, \u201cdiscovered\u201d that in developing these capabilities their virtual creatures had engaged in malicious, unprogrammed operations against other companies\u2019 systems. Both companies then agreed to request the intervention of the same political authority that, only a few months earlier, had asked them to help increase their cyber autonomy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feedback from anomie through unrestrained AI?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, global anomie is the breeding ground for predatory policies in this international economic system, which until only yesterday could be tempered by \u201cmultilateralism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without clear rules or agreed procedures, the consequences of the absence of norms fall above all on societies already affected by inequalities and historical abuses, which today are also subject to manipulation through screens and AI tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without multilateral backing, Latin American countries will find it difficult to counter these inequalities and abuses, now amplified by AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Appropriation of digital markets<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Trump administration\u2019s coercion to capture Latin American digital markets is manifested in two ways: compulsory agreements and, when such agreements cannot be reached, the adoption of unilateral measures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the compulsory instruments, the bilateral \u201creciprocal trade\u201d agreements concluded by the United States in early 2026 with Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala stand out. The English-language texts include extensive lists of commitments undertaken by the Latin American counterparts, without reciprocity on the U.S. side, and invariably use the modal verb \u201cshall,\u201d which establishes the strictest obligations. In this way, unconditional access to digital markets by U.S. providers is enshrined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the outset, the possibility for the signatory Latin American countries to regulate content and corporate practices aimed at manipulating people\u2019s will is carefully foreclosed, because the introduction of any such rules would be challenged as a discriminatory barrier or obstacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, the international transfer of data (including personal data) is guaranteed, on the understanding that the U.S. domestic legal system will ensure adequate protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the absence of negotiated agreements, an alternative means of appropriating digital markets is to resort to U.S. legislation itself, deploying procedures such as the one initiated on July 15, 2025, by the Office of the United States Trade Representative under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, with the purpose of assessing certain measures and practices of the Brazilian government. At the outset of the procedure, alleged harm to U.S. companies was cited on the grounds that they had been denied free access to the Brazilian market in various areas, including digital commerce and electronic payment services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One year later, additional tariffs have been imposed on numerous Brazilian products on the grounds that certain Brazilian laws and judicial decisions harmed U.S. companies. Yet these measures did not violate any international obligation; rather, they were adopted in the exercise of the digital sovereignty that belongs to every independent state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why the AI uprising reveals problems of socialization<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n These experiences of digital harassment against Latin American societies point to an uncertain future. This is demonstrated by the events mentioned above, attributed to an uncontrolled AI when it encounters no rational resistance capable of containing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The scale of the problem was recently highlighted by U.S. cybersecurity expert Michael Sulmeyer, who pointed to the risks arising from the uncontrolled development of generative AI in the United States, including the capacity to sabotage critical infrastructure networks. The threats are multiplied by the creation in China of models comparable to those in the United States which, when released as \u201copen source,\u201d increase the risks of hacking and sabotage, feeding the climate of suspicion between the two powers. Sulmeyer suggests minimizing external threats to U.S. critical infrastructure through the reinstallation of analog or digital systems, but always with programmed switches capable of circumventing potential catastrophes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, these ideas sound like palliatives that do not go far enough to minimize the sources of the cyber threat. Instead, a direct approach to the problem should focus on restoring a multilateral order capable of framing conflicts involving digital markets and AI according to the criterion of reasonableness or consistency cultivated over many years by the World Trade Organization\u2019s Dispute Settlement System. This criterion rests on an axiom: even in bilateral disagreements, global values and interests are at stake. But why will it prove so difficult to recreate this necessary international convergence?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Man is reflected in AI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Training generative AI consists of transferring to it the logical chains or algorithms refined by humanity over generations. It should come as no surprise that, once equipped with these tools and with the available body of data, AI models can expand the logical connections they have learned on their own, just as human beings use their previously internalized associative capacity to weave original metonymies and metaphors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the alarms triggered by the disruptive performance of advanced models developed by Anthropic and OpenAI seem to indicate that, unlike humans when they deploy their creative imagination, these entities (for now) lack self-inhibitory brakes that would allow them to control the adverse effects of their own creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The messianism of Silicon Valley\u2019s prophets reflects a collective orphanhood: they cannot socialize their virtual creatures because they themselves seem to have lost their boundaries. At an even higher level, the intergovernmental and transactional frameworks that shaped multilateralism have also crumbled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This latter loss is symptomatic: multilateral frameworks fulfill, in international relations, functions equivalent to those of the self-inhibitory mechanisms refined through the arduous individual processes of socialization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rebuilding multilateralism from the ground up does not seem easy. Nevertheless, faced with such a challenge and for the sake of our own survival, we Latin Americans should not remain indifferent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The AI \u201cuprising\u201d exposes a global state of anomie in which the weakening of multilateralism leaves Latin America vulnerable to the technological and economic power of the major powers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":454,"featured_media":58362,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17077],"tags":[15635],"gps":[],"class_list":["post-58393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-inteligencia-artificial-en","tag-debates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/454"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58395,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58393\/revisions\/58395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58393"},{"taxonomy":"gps","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gps?post=58393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/L21-Banner-INGLES-1024x190.png\")
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