Artificial Intelligence · Bolivia
AI regulation in Bolivia: laws & policy (2026)
Bolivia shaded by its artificial intelligence status
AI in Bolivia: proposed, anchored by Proyecto de Ley N° 178/2024-2025 (Senate-approved, pending Chamber of Deputies); AGETIC (Agencia de Gobierno Electrónico y Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación) as interim digital governance authority.
Bolivia has no enacted AI-specific law as of May 2026. The Senate approved a comprehensive AI bill, 'Promoción, Gestión y Uso de la Inteligencia Artificial' (Proyecto de Ley N° 178/2024-2025), on 22 October 2025, but the legislation remained pending before the Chamber of Deputies with constitutional debates ongoing into early 2026. In the absence of dedicated AI legislation, no unified national AI strategy or sector-specific AI rules are formally in force.
Key points
Proyecto de Ley N° 178/2024-2025 was approved by Bolivia's Senate on 22 October 2025 and forwarded to the Chamber of Deputies. As of May 2026 it had not been promulgated; February 2026 legal analyses were still debating its constitutional scope.
The bill would create the Autoridad de Regulación de la Inteligencia Artificial (ARIA) as a new decentralised body with functional autonomy to certify AI systems, set ethical and technical standards, supervise compliance, and impose administrative sanctions.
Under the bill, AGETIC would be required to elaborate a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy within 180 days of the law's enactment. No official national AI strategy has been published as of the research date.
The bill enshrines 12 governing principles including algorithmic transparency, non-discrimination, personal data protection, technological sovereignty, and human dignity. Seven high-risk practices are explicitly banned, including subliminal manipulation, mass facial recognition without a judicial order, and discriminatory algorithmic profiling.
The proposed law would apply to any natural or legal person, public or private, that develops, provides, uses, or deploys AI systems in Bolivia or whose systems produce effects within Bolivian territory, covering generative AI models, machine learning, and autonomous decision-making algorithms.
Bolivia's broader digital governance remains fragmented. The AGETIC 2025 public accountability report and La Paz's Open Government Action Plan 2025-2026 incorporate AI-adjacent e-government elements but no unified national AI policy framework is operative pending the law.
Timeline - major decisions & events
Bolivia's Chamber of Senators approved a 31-article bill that would create the Artificial Intelligence Regulatory Authority (ARIA), enshrine 12 'plurinational principles', require AGETIC to produce a National AI Strategy within 180 days, and ban absolutely subliminal manipulation, social-credit scoring, and mass facial recognition without a judicial order. The bill passed to the Chamber of Deputies and remained under lower-house review as of early 2026.
La Razón (Bolivia) ↗A parallel legislative initiative on the 'Promotion, Management and Use of Artificial Intelligence' was registered in the Chamber of Deputies (PL-558/24), giving the lower house its own vehicle to shape AI policy alongside the Senate's Bill 178, reflecting multi-chamber legislative interest in the issue.
Cámara de Diputados de Bolivia ↗President Luis Arce signed Supreme Decree 5367 establishing Bolivia's national Digital Agenda through 2030, designating AI with a rights-based and technological-sovereignty approach as one of five strategic axes; AGETIC was tasked with monitoring and evaluating implementation across all executive-branch entities.
AGETIC – Agencia de Gobierno Electrónico y TIC ↗An EU-funded InDiCo-Global open-call project ran January-July 2025 to help Bolivian institutions benchmark against international AI governance standards (EU AI Act, GDPR), formally documenting Bolivia's near-total absence of a unified data-protection or AI framework.
InDiCo Global (EU-funded initiative) ↗All 193 UNESCO member states, including Bolivia, adopted the first global normative instrument on AI ethics at the 41st General Conference, covering transparency, accountability, and human rights. The Recommendation now constitutes Bolivia's primary soft-law reference in ongoing AI legislative debates.
UNESCO ↗Bolivia enacted its Digital Citizenship Law, granting full legal validity to electronic acts and assigning AGETIC authority over digital identity and e-government services; the law created the principal legal substrate on which AI-assisted public-service delivery would later be built.
SILEP – Sistema de Información de Leyes del Estado Plurinacional ↗AGETIC published the national E-Government Plan setting 14 strategic lines, including Open Government, Digital Services, and Digital Citizenship, that provided the institutional and operational scaffold for AI pilot programmes (e.g., Lab-IA for fiscal analytics and geospatial vaccination planning) in subsequent years.
AGETIC (Bolivia) ↗Bolivia's executive approved the formal Electronic Government Implementation Plan and mandated adoption of Free Software and Open Standards across state entities, establishing the legal basis for AGETIC's authority over digital, and by extension AI, technologies in government.
AGETIC (Bolivia) ↗Bolivia created AGETIC (Agencia de Gobierno Electrónico y Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación) as a decentralised body under the Ministry of the Presidency, making it the de-facto future AI oversight authority in public administration and the institution now mandated under both the Agenda Digital 2030 and pending AI bills.
AGETIC (Bolivia) ↗Bolivia - other topics
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