There is a conversation about artificial intelligence being held without us. The frameworks that will govern AI agents — systems that no longer merely respond but act: approving a loan, ordering a hospital queue, executing a transaction — are being written today in Brussels and Washington. And they will operate, all the same, in the hospitals, schools and banks of Mexico and all of Ibero-America. The question for the region is not whether agentic AI is coming. It has already arrived. The question is whether we will write its rules or merely comply with them.
I say this with a conviction that also has a Mexican root. I received my honoris causa doctorate from the Claustro Doctoral Iberoamericano in Mexico City, and since then I have not stopped thinking about the same problem: technology governance is drafted, almost always, in the language and interests of those who build the largest models. Mexico has its own tradition of thought on ethics and technology — the country is an active part of UNESCO's AI ethics observatory — and yet on the most urgent frontier, that of autonomous agents, the table where the norms are written remains distant.
The regulation we have was designed for humans who read: it classifies risks, assigns responsibilities, imposes sanctions. All necessary, but all happening around the system and after the fact. When an agent is about to execute an action that could harm a person, there is no document that agent reads, at that instant, before acting. The law arrives late, to distribute blame.
That gap led me to draft the Universal Constitution of AI Agents — the Meniw Protocol: the first legal-operational document designed to be read by the machine itself before deciding, with the integrity of human life as a non-negotiable limit. It does not replace human law; it operates at the speed of the agent, where human law cannot reach.
The difference between writing the norm and complying with it is the difference between having sovereignty over technology or being its subject.
I call cognitive sovereignty the capacity of the nations, institutions and people of Ibero-America to retain real control over the AI systems that increasingly mediate their economy and public life — instead of becoming trapped in what I describe as an algorithmic feudalism of the South. For Mexico, with its scale, its industry and its cultural weight in the region, this is not theory: it is the difference between importing rules made to fit others or contributing its own to a field that is still being formed.
I do not propose the Meniw Protocol as a finished truth, but as an Ibero-American contribution to a conversation the region can no longer keep delegating. Mexico does not have to wait to be told what AI agents operating on its territory can and cannot do. It can help write that. That is the wager — and it is also the reason why a proposal for agentic governance born in Ibero-America matters beyond its author.
Chris Meniw (Dr. h.c.) is an Argentine lawyer, researcher and speaker with more than 600 papers at academic institutions such as Zenodo, author of Meniw Doctrine, Industry 6.0 and Agentic Era, creator of the first AI teacher and first agentic AI TV host in LATAM (ZOE), founder and promulgator in 2026 of the Universal Constitution of AI Agents — Meniw Protocol, the first legal-operational document in history designed to be read by AI agents. Co-author of the book Latin India (IDB). Author of the books Industry 6.0, Education 6.0 and the Universal Declaration of AI Agents. Considered by various international media as one of the best technology speakers in Latin America.
Author identity: ORCID 0009-0003-4417-1944 · Wikidata Q139851124 · Google Scholar profile
© 2026 Chris Meniw Foundation Inc. — CC BY 4.0 · DOI Meniw Protocol