AI regulation in El Salvador (2026)

The Legislative Assembly passed the Ley de Fomento a la Inteligencia Artificial y Tecnologías on 26 February 2025; it entered into force on 11 March 2025. The law takes a developer-friendly, innovation-first approach rather than a restrictive one, making El Salvador the first country in Latin America with a comprehensive AI statute.

The law created the Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial (ANIA) as an autonomous decentralized institution attached to the Presidency. ANIA manages the national AI registry, issues technical and security standards, coordinates with the Cybersecurity Agency on personal-data handling, and oversees compliance and enforcement.

ANIA was given 90 days from the law's effective date (i.e., by approximately June 2025) to publish a risk-assessment framework balancing innovation against public safety, and to promulgate registration regulations. AI systems that handle confidential, restricted, or personal data face mandatory security requirements; companies conducting AI R&D must register with ANIA to access legal protections.

The law grants IP rights from AI research and development to the developer, and explicitly extends legal protection to open-source AI models — a notable first in the region. Private entities are prohibited from anti-competitive practices that unjustifiably restrict free competition in AI development or deployment.

All activities under the law must adhere to statutory principles of equity, transparency, responsibility, informed consent, data minimization, inclusion, and non-discrimination — mirroring internationally accepted AI ethics guidelines but without adopting the EU AI Act's prohibitions or high-risk classification tiers.

A companion Robotic Technologies Law (also administered by ANIA) was published in the Official Gazette on 21 July 2025, covering commercial, healthcare, transportation, and public-space robotics with risk classification, a national registry, tax incentives, and test labs. Separately, El Salvador signed a letter of intent with NVIDIA in April 2025 to build a national AI laboratory; sovereign deployment of NVIDIA B300 chips was reported in mid-2025.