AI regulation in Venezuela: laws & policy (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.