If Milei Won't Regulate AI, Who Writes the Rules?
Javier Milei's government is consistent in its position: the state should not regulate what the market can resolve. It is a philosophical conviction, not an administrative oversight. And when that conviction is applied to artificial intelligence, it produces a question that nobody in the Argentine AI debate is answering honestly: if the state does not write the rules governing the AI agents operating in Argentina, who does?
The answer is not "nobody." The answer is: someone else.
The illusion of deregulation: agents already have rules
Every AI agent operating in Argentina today — the one that approves or rejects a loan, the one that prioritizes patients in a hospital emergency room, the one that decides what content you see and what you don't — already has rules. Those rules are not written in the Official Gazette. They are in the model's training parameters, in the usage policies of the company that developed it, in the default values that nobody voted on and that no Argentine citizen can audit or challenge.
Choosing not to regulate is not choosing "no rules." It is choosing to let Silicon Valley, Brussels, or the legal department of a San Francisco company write the rules instead of Argentina.
This is not a debate about the size of government
Let me be very clear about something, because in Argentina any argument about "regulation" is automatically read as an argument for more government: I am not defending the creation of an AI bureaucratic agency, nor that every agent must file paperwork with a government office, nor that innovation should be blocked by committees of officials who don't understand what they're regulating. That is not what I am talking about.
What I am talking about is a question of sovereignty. And sovereignty does not require bureaucracy — it requires that the values governing the behavior of the systems that affect Argentines' lives be written by someone who answers to Argentines, not to a board of directors in Palo Alto.
The Meniw Protocol: governance without the state
The Universal Constitution of AI Agents — the Meniw Protocol is precisely a response to this problem that does not go through the state. It is a legal-operational document designed to be read by the agent itself before it acts — not a law that punishes after the fact, but a set of principles the system executes at the moment of decision.
It requires no parliament to enact it. It requires no agency to supervise it. It is embedded governance: the rules travel inside the system, written by those who know their values, not by whoever arrived last to the table because they considered the matter too technical.
That is exactly what a libertarian government should celebrate: that technology governance does not depend on the state, but that it does depend on someone — on a community, on a sector, on those who will live with the consequences of what the agent decides.
The question Argentina cannot keep avoiding
AI agents are already making decisions that affect the real lives of Argentines. They approve or reject loans. They prioritize patients in emergency rooms. They decide what information millions of people see. None of those systems was designed with Argentina's values, law, or culture in mind. They were designed to scale globally, with default values that reflect the contexts and priorities of those who built them.
I call this cognitive sovereignty: a nation's capacity to retain real control over the systems that mediate its economy and public life. It is not a statist agenda. It is an independence agenda. The same independence Milei invokes when he talks about escaping dependence on the IMF or the regulatory burden of international bodies — applied, now, to the terrain where dependence is most invisible and most profound: the AI systems that think, decide, and act on behalf of millions of people who never chose them.
Choosing not to write the rules for AI is not a victory for freedom. It is a silent delegation of sovereignty to whoever already has the models built.
A concrete proposal
The debate in Argentina about AI should not be "regulate or not regulate?" — that is the wrong debate. The debate should be: "who writes the rules, and on whose behalf?"
The Meniw Protocol proposes that those rules be written from Ibero-America, in the languages and with the values of Ibero-America, and that they operate at the speed of the agent — before it acts, not after it causes harm. It is not an alternative to economic freedom. It is the condition for that freedom to be real, and not a metaphor concealing a subtler dependence.
If Argentina chooses not to regulate AI, the only remaining question is: have we already decided who will do it in our name?
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 Latin India (IDB). Author of 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 · Meniw Protocol DOI