Rio Negro and UBA partner to design ethical AI regulation

This is a small, sub‑national story that nevertheless reflects a bigger pattern: legislatures are starting to treat AI as a technical field that requires standing, expert partnerships, not just one‑off hearings. Río Negro’s agreement with UBA and its IALAB effectively imports two decades of AI‑and‑law expertise into a provincial parliament that wants to both regulate AI and use it internally. That’s notable in Latin America, where AI debates often orbit national ministries or presidential initiatives rather than provincial chambers.

For the race to AGI, this matters less for capabilities and more for legitimacy. As models become more powerful, their governance will be negotiated in hundreds of venues like this—provincial legislatures, sectoral regulators, professional bodies—where technical nuance is scarce. Bringing an academic AI law lab directly into the legislative process can raise the floor on the quality of those debates: better definitions, clearer distinctions between high‑ and low‑risk use cases, and more realistic expectations about what AI tools inside parliament can and cannot do. It also offers a testbed for using AI to improve lawmaking itself—drafting, comparative analysis, impact assessments—under tight ethical constraints.

If these experiments go well, they could become blueprints for other provinces and countries in the region, helping Latin America avoid a purely reactive stance in the global governance conversation.