AI regulation in Venezuela (2026)

The Proyecto de Ley de Inteligencia Artificial (57 articles, four chapters) was approved unanimously in first reading by the National Assembly on 19 November 2024; second reading was scheduled for Q1 2025 but the bill had not been enacted as of early 2026.

The bill would create a National AI Agency (Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial) — a public institute under the Ministry of Science and Technology — empowered to maintain a national registry of AI providers, issue regulations, supervise compliance, and impose sanctions.

The AI Bill includes criminal penalties — including prison sentences — for deceptive deepfakes that simulate a person's face, voice, gestures, or behavior without consent and cause harm to third parties.

On 19 February 2026, MINCYT published a non-binding Code of Ethics for AI, establishing nine principles: humanistic AI, equity, environmental responsibility, security, privacy, transparency, accountability, open science, and excellence. It constitutes soft law with no enforceable sanctions.

The government pursues a 'sovereign AI' strategy with three pillars: training specialised talent, building domestic computing infrastructure, and developing free/open-source AI models; approximately 65 active government AI projects span education, health, and energy, with a cooperation agreement signed with China.

Legal analysts note the draft bill contains ambiguities about scope — in particular whether globally accessible AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) fall under its remit — potentially creating an asymmetric compliance burden on domestic versus foreign providers.