This story by Carlos E. Flores originally appeared on Global Voices on May 30, 2026.

A person checks their phone, types a question, and receives an answer in seconds. They do not know how it works, what data they are giving away, or who is behind that answer. But they use it anyway.

Artificial intelligence is already present in school assignments, work decisions, and processes that used to take hours. It works. It integrates. It advances. In Ecuador, there is no coordinated AI policy; rather, initiatives move forward separately. Ministries, the National Assembly (Congress), regulatory agencies, and academia promote their own proposals, with different timelines and priorities. The result is that laws, strategies and regulations overlap or fail to connect, without a common direction.

While AI technology becomes embedded in everyday life, decisions about its use, limits and consequences remain far removed from the people already using it.

In that context, at the end of 2025 more than 60 people gathered at FLACSO Ecuador for “Artificial Intelligence and Digital Rights: Different Perspectives for the Common Good,” in an attempt to open a conversation that, until now, continues to take place in limited spaces.

The meeting was promoted by Openlab, in coordination with Futuroscon.IA and the CTS Lab at FLACSO Ecuador, with the support of a project funded by Probox. That collaboration made it possible to bring together social organizations, academia, public institutions, and other actors connected to the artificial intelligence and digital rights debate. The main panel included the participation of the Office of the Ombudsman, Derechos Digitales, Datalat, and the Ministry of Telecommunications (MINTEL).

The event also included sessions that expanded the discussion from other angles: Jonathan Finlay of LaLibre noted that artificial intelligence is already influencing decisions without there yet being a clear understanding of its effects, while Article 19’s Martha Tudón directed the conversation toward surveillance, data use, and risks to rights in contexts without clear controls.

From the CTS Lab at FLACSO, the RAM methodology — promoted by UNESCO — introduced another way of looking at the problem. The question was not what artificial intelligence can do, but whether the country is prepared to sustain it. The tool evaluates laws, institutional capacities, rights protection, and levels of public understanding to identify whether the use of these technologies can expand without losing control over their effects.

During the unconference (a methodology in which participants collectively define the discussion topics), that concern took shape through concrete cases. At the privacy table, participants mentioned the example of a public hospital worker who, due to the lack of institutional tools, entered sensitive medical data into artificial intelligence platforms from a personal account in order to organize their work. Currently, there are no clear guidelines regarding such use, nor effective controls over how that information is handled or protected.

In education, the tension is expressed differently. Students resort to artificial intelligence tools to complete assignments, write papers, or form opinions without fully engaging with the content, weakening the development of independent judgment. At the same time, part of the teaching community fluctuates between prohibition and an approach focused on plagiarism, without clear tools to integrate these technologies into the learning process or encourage more critical use.

In the area of inclusion and gender, participants discussed how systems are trained with data that excludes Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community-based knowledge. This not only reproduces those absences in decision-making, but also reinforces a dominant form of knowledge, centered on Western and scientific perspectives, that ends up displacing other ways of understanding and living reality.

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Regarding governance, the discussion revealed a fundamental problem; it has not yet been defined which aspect of artificial intelligence should be regulated: its use, development, investment, or automated decision-making. Layered onto that lack of clarity is another tension: adopting external models without considering the local context, or moving toward controls that may be excessive for an ecosystem still in formation. In that scenario, regulation risks becoming extensive, impractical, and difficult to apply in practice.

Outside the discussion tables, that debate had already begun taking shape in the country’s National Assembly. Although spaces for discussion have been opened, they have not necessarily succeeded in bringing about broader participation. In 2024, the National Assembly received three bills, each with different approaches, including research, commercialization of artificial intelligence systems, incorporation of data protection, transparency, and copyright, and protection of children and adolescents from the use of these technologies.

Following the unification of the artificial intelligence bills, the debate has shown no visible progress in recent months, and in different spaces the possibility has begun to be mentioned that the proposal could be shelved, without there yet being a clear definition of its future.

While the regulatory discussion remains stalled, actors with real capacity to influence the development and use of these technologies are beginning to gain ground. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa met with Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, one of the most influential companies in large-scale data analysis worldwide. The company, which has worked with agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, and immigration systems in the United States, has built its capabilities on the integration of large volumes of information for security and intelligence purposes.

Palantir’s opening of an office in Ecuador comes at a moment when the rules are still unclear, in a field where the same technology that makes it possible to optimize services can also enable forms of surveillance that are difficult to control.

On the other hand, on March 10, 2026, the Ecuadorian government presented the Strategy for the Promotion of the Development and Ethical and Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in Ecuador (EFIA-EC), promoted by the Ministry of Telecommunications and the Information Society with support from the IDB and UNESCO. The proposal outlines a four-year roadmap, structured around three axes: governance, capacity and technology, and adoption and development, with the explicit objective that artificial intelligence should not be a privilege for a few, but a tool at the service of citizens, the state, and productive development.

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In that context, not only have the results of the meeting,  collected in a report built from the thematic discussion tables, begun circulating among participants, they have already been delivered to the Ministry of Telecommunications as the governing body, and to the Ombudsman’s Office, at a moment when these technologies are increasingly intersecting with debates on digital rights and the protection of human rights.

Against the backdrop of strategy, pending regulation, and the growing adoption of these technologies, the country is moving through still unstable terrain, where development advances faster than the definitions of its limits.

[AV]

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