Science and Technology

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Argentina and Brazil take different approaches to AI, the United States carries out a military strike in Venezuela, and Lionel Messi scores a World Cup hat trick.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Argentina and Brazil take different approaches to AI, the United States carries out a military strike in Venezuela, and Lionel Messi scores a World Cup hat trick.

Last week, Brazil became the fifth country—and the first from the global south—to sign a digital partnership agreement with the European Union, following Canada, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. The deal commits the EU and Brazil to annual meetings on topics such as ethical artificial intelligence use and tech cooperation.

“Europe and Latin America are allies in many areas, like regulation of big tech companies,” said Celso Amorim, the top foreign-policy advisor to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in a Tuesday speech at the Forte International Security Conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil’s legislature is currently considering a draft AI regulatory framework that borrows heavily from the EU’s stringent approach. Brazil is not the only country in the region trying to position itself as a global leader on AI. While Lula pushes for the safe and ethical use of AI, Argentine President Javier Milei is taking a different tack—trying to cut as much red tape as he can.

Milei submitted an AI bill to Congress that includes “a commitment to keep AI unregulated” and permission for companies to consist of AI agents, with no human shareholders required, the president wrote in a Financial Times op-ed earlier this month.

The latter prospect is so controversial that it immediately prompted a rebuttal from prominent historian Yuval Noah Harari, who said Milei’s proposal could unleash dangerous consequences. Tech libertarians such as Peter Thiel, who recently bought a house in Buenos Aires, have held meetings with Milei and other top officials.

None of the world’s frontier AI models are currently made in Latin America. The region is increasingly attracting investments in data centers, however, with projects worth tens of billions of dollars announced last year in both Brazil and Argentina. The companies that run them are headquartered overseas, including China’s ByteDance and the United........

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