A woman seen from behind looks at a huge selection of lettuce and greens in a supermarket refrigerator. 

The Age of Hypertrophy 

A person holds a giant Brazilian flag while perched above a crowd of people at a rally on a large avenue, a few people are holding phones in the air. One person holds their hand in the air in the L shape, signifying support for Lula. 

Supporters of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at an election rally on Oct 11, 2026 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Rodilei Morais/Fotoarena/Sipa USA)

Meta Moderation Failures Loom Over Brazil’s Runoff Presidential Election

Colombian President Abelardo De La Espriella, left, and United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio embrace during a bilateral agreements signing ceremony in Barranquilla, Colombia, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, Pool)

US Mining MoU with Colombia Must Safeguard Community Rights and Sustainability

A voter leaves a polling station as voting continues in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on October 8, 2026 in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

UK Election Watchdog Develops AI System to Flag Deepfakes Within 3 Hours

Image Authentication Should be a Condition of AI Decisions

The International AI Summit exhibitors floor in Dublin, Ireland on October 14, 2026. Liz Carolan/Tech Policy Press

Riverdance Inside, Protestors Outside at Ireland’s Big AI Branding Bash

A blue flag with the logo of the ICC (a balancing weight) waves in the foreground with blue skies and whites clouds. In the background, the top of some office buildings. 

A view of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, on August 22, 2026. (Photo by Karolina Janik/JPix/NurPhoto)

Two Targets, One Tactic as US Sanctions ICC and Silences #DisInfo2026

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The World’s Growing Patchwork of Age Bans and What It Reveals

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Multiple Polls Find Most Americans Think AI is Moving Too Fast

President Stubb and Prime Minister Støre in Rovaniemi on September 13, 2026. Photo: Katja Säilä / Finnish Government

AI Governance Needs an Internet-Style Network, Not a Global Overseer

Person hold the speaker to broadcast something

Why Multistakeholder Action Matters More than Ever for Trust & Safety

This image depicts clusters of various mushrooms growing on a network of surveillance cameras against a dark green textured background.

India’s GDPR-Inspired Privacy Law Leaves State Power Unchecked

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A protester in Mumbai, India is detained by police during a protest demanding the resignation of the country's chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Oct. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

India’s SIR Voter Purge Shows Digital Authoritarianism in Action

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Spirit Airlines Is Selling Its Workers’ Data. That Can’t Fly.

President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday Sept. 29, 2026, during a lunch meeting with top executives of AI firms, as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, left, and Elon Musk listen. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

AI Governance Is Being Decided Now, and the Public Isn’t in the Room

In this photo provided by Ukraine's 65th Mechanized Brigade press service, A Ukrainian serviceman launches a drone towards Russian positions at the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Wednesday Oct. 7, 2026. (Andriy Andriyenko/Ukraine's 65th Mechanized Brigade via AP)

Coding Kids, Drone Wars and Algorithmic Realism

Teachers attend an artificial intelligence professional development and certification program hosted by learning company Pearson on August 7, 2026, in Miami. Nearly 200 teachers from Miami-Dade County Public Schools participated and are now working toward a verified AI credential as they begin the new school year. The program is part of Pearson's commitment to expand AI learning opportunities for teachers nationwide through the White House's "Pledge to America's Youth: Investing in AI Education." (Jesus Aranguren/AP Content Services for Pearson)

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Ukrainian servicemen of the Pathfinder Unmanned Systems Battalion of the 115th Separate Mechanized Brigade attend a training with Vampire UAVs, practicing munition drops at an undisclosed location in Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrii Marienko)

Steve Feldstein on Bytes, Bullets, Blood and Borders

In this Jan. 16, 2017, file photo, the abandoned childhood home of singer Aretha Franklin sits behind a security fence in Memphis, Tenn. The Franklin birthplace and the surrounding neighborhoods moved to the forefront of a large cleanup effort, as the city refused to accept decay as a fact of life in the urban landscape. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

A Data Science Playbook for Social Justice

Who Participates in Politics on Social Media, and Why?

We have mistaken our ability to produce more, for evidence that more is what we need. Agriculture solved calorie scarcity and then, with some considerable ingenuity, produced supermarket shelves that contain enough food to 

 a small medieval kingdom—at least in some parts of the world. For a great many of us, industry solved manufacturing scarcity and we are now literally drowning in oceans of 

solved knowledge scarcity with the internet and social media as the perfect expression of what followed – that information is no longer difficult to find. On the contrary, it’s impossible to escape, through the ubiquitous screens — first at our office desk, then at home, now on our bodies — fighting for our undivided attention.

Artificial Intelligence may be the first technology to reveal what happens when information itself becomes hypertrophic — when, like a muscle responding to exercise, growth makes us stronger but only up to a point, before more growth becomes counterproductive.

: an age in which abundance keeps growing without ever asking whether scarcity was the problem to begin with.

More information, more things to consume — more everything — until abundance itself turns into its own undoing. Put simply, there is only so much chocolate we can eat before we feel sick.

We have built systems whose capacity to produce has grown beyond our capacity to meaningfully attend to or make use of what they produce. And as machines take on more of the cognitive work, we may find ourselves with fewer opportunities — and motivation — to exercise the human capacities that work once demanded.

The great promise of AI rests on a simple proposition – that intelligence can now be produced at scale. We can generate essays, computer code, music, and equally convincing nonsense at a speed that leaves us awestruck. Struck enough to believe that 

For centuries, however, education was built around the opposite condition – that knowledge was scarce. Books and expertise were scarce, communication was slow, access to information was expensive. Schools, universities and libraries emerged partly in response – gathering knowledge, curating it, preserving it, passing it on. But we never stopped to ask, what exactly was scarce, and who had made it so?

 as the process by which economic life was dislocated from the social relations in which it had been deeply embedded. Land and labor, once part of social life, were reorganized as “fictitious commodities”. Something similar can be seen in what happened to learning. A farmer learned farming by farming, and work, learning and rest were part of the same life. Then labor became a job, learning became schooling, and leisure a luxury, while the ordinary places in which people learned from one another and from the work they did became incidental to what counted as legitimate education. Ivan Illich 

 these older forms of learning as embedded in concentric circles of meaningful structures — family, work, craft, community, language, religion. Learning happened through participation because life itself was educational.

What looked like a scarcity of knowledge was, in part, what led to further concentration. Learning was taken out of the world and out of the person and reorganized into subjects and certified expertise, administered by specialists and measured against ever-changing standards. Education made knowledge available, but it also helped define where legitimate learning could take place and what it should look like. For a moment the internet disrupted all that and promised anyone with a bit of interest to find pretty much anything they want to learn about and do regardless of their abilities or context.

What some tech salespeople call ‘the inevitable future’

AI arrives at this point promising to extend this disruption and generate abundance but equally also accelerate further extraction, this time of the cognitive labor of learning itself. The machine can now perform the work underneath the educational product – the first draft, the translation, even the judgement about whether the answer is any good.

Even if we grant the strongest claims made for AI — and call what it produces ‘intelligence’ — abundance doesn’t automatically create meaning or have purpose. A million AI-generated novels don’t create a million readers; infinite information doesn’t produce infinite attention.

And yet the institutional response is more supply of everything. More platforms, more personalized instruction, more data collection, more AI. Governments and institutions are building frameworks and programs for AI in education, while schools and universities are being encouraged to incorporate these systems into teaching and learning.

The emerging evidence, meanwhile, offers concerning glimpses of what this new abundance might do to our cognitive capacities. An 

 recently found that people writing essays with AI show weaker brain connectivity alongside lower reported ownership of their work and poorer recall, an effect researchers called ‘cognitive debt’.

 found lower delayed knowledge retention among students who used ChatGPT as a study aid. These findings are early, but they make it harder to treat the outsourcing of cognitive work as educationally neutral. What happens when the “

” becomes permanent, and the muscle we were supposed to be exercising never gets the chance to grow?

The temptation of AI is that it makes the typical struggle around learning look inefficient – as though it’s wrong to take years to learn a language or write a beautiful love letter. Why struggle to formulate an argument when the machine can formulate ten in ten seconds? Why read the book when AI can summarize it?

Then again, where exactly are we in a rush to? We still have to live the lives that all this efficiency was supposed to give us more time to live. We count completed essays and hours saved, while the things formed through the process are discarded as though they never mattered. You were supposed to be studying with your friends, but instead you stayed up all night laughing about silly stuff; a child spends an afternoon building a den in the garden for no particular reason.

These are the apparently wasted hours through which we exercise being human. A muscle grows because it’s repeatedly asked to do difficult things; when the demand disappears, it can atrophy. Our cognitive capacities have their own forms of exertion. We become capable of thinking by thinking, of remembering by remembering, of being resilient by having something to endure.

AI promises to remove much of that exertion. The hypertrophy of our technological environment may end up inducing the atrophy of our human capacities it was meant to augment. Those apparently wasted hours leave something behind, experiences and relationships that become part of the structure we carry into the future where, in hardships it is those apparently insignificant fragments of the past that give us somewhere to stand.

AI can generate all kinds of things. The harder thing may be finding the time and attention to live through the hours that produce nothing, yet nothing is just as meaningful. For adults, perhaps this is an irritating feature of modern life, but for our children it’s the fabric from which they are now being shaped.

They have no memory of the world before this flood. We are constructing the environment in which the next generation will learn what thinking feels like, what being human and being humane means. Perhaps we should grab hold of the places where learning still happens as part of life — the kitchen, the street, the broken bicycle, the blank page — places where education happens without announcing itself as such.

The danger of this new Age is that its definition of progress assumes that enough efficiency will finally bring us to equilibrium, and that equilibrium will bring abundance. We spent centuries trying to make knowledge abundant and seemingly succeeded. We now need to ask what all this abundance is for — and give a plausible answer.

Tatiana Dias is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

Brazil is just days away from a runoff election in which the Workers’ Party (PT) candidate, incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will face far-right Liberal Party (PL) candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator and the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The race is extremely tight.

In the first round, Bolsonaro surprised many by earning more votes than Lula, while his party elected the largest far-right caucus in congressional history.

The fierce second-round campaign is playing out across social media, especially on Meta’s platforms — the main public arena for political debate in Brazil. More than 70% of Brazilians rely on Instagram 

. But day after day, evidence mounts that Meta has failed to ensure a level playing field for both candidates.

Allegations of censorship, account bans, reach suppression, and algorithmic discrimination that appear to disproportionately affect Lula and his supporters are piling up. 

 a complaint with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) on Saturday, demanding fair treatment online. Lula’s campaign 

 Meta to international observers and to the Organization of American States. The cases are also under 

scrutiny from the Federal Prosecutor’s Office

, which opened an investigation on Wednesday to examine Meta’s conduct during the elections.

 sent to the New York Times, Meta denied political interference and said that “it is unfortunate that minor technical issues are being spun into a political narrative. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

from United States President Donald Trump. Tariffs imposed by the US government, the 

 — have put external pressure on the country that is also reverberating across Latin America. In this geopolitical context, the role of Big Tech companies that are politically aligned with Trump has created an atmosphere of suspicion.

Concerning evidence has been mounting in recent weeks, and the nonprofit organization I cofounded and direct—

—has collected many examples of questionable content moderation decisions. Before the first round, such decisions 

, including Meta’s blocking of ads from the PT campaign’s official account. Now, there are also thousands of reports of restricted users, complaints about bias in Meta AI outputs, and a “technical glitch” that undermined the performance of Lula’s videos on Instagram, all favoring Bolsonaro’s PL campaign.

According to the PT campaign, the far-right candidate’s videos 

 there were technical errors in how video views were counted globally, while denying any political interference in Brazil. “We identified a technical problem affecting some video metrics. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson said.

Another basic failure was the lack of safeguards in Meta AI’s image generation related to candidates. Anyone who asks the tool to generate an image or a T-shirt design with “Flávio” and “22” — the far-right party’s ballot number — gets the request fulfilled, using the candidate’s real photo. But when asked to generate an image of Lula, the AI refuses, saying it was unable to generate the image. The test 

 by millions of Brazilians using a wide range of prompts.

Meta AI does generate images of Lula for users outside of Brazil or when using a VPN, which suggests a geo-targeted block.

 by a columnist for UOL, the Meta AI system responded: “You are right to point that out — there should not be different treatment. What happened here was: I tried to generate both banners you requested with ‘lula 13’ and the automatic safety system for images blocked it. When you requested with ‘flavio 22,’ the same system allowed it and I generated it.” In response to an additional prompt, the tool offered that “this violates the core principle of Brazilian electoral law.”

Hours after the story went viral, Meta told the press it was taking additional measures to ensure that prompts using either of the candidate’s first names and ballot number would not produce images. However, Meta AI 

 of Flávio Bolsonaro with minimal encouragement, but not of Lula.

Lula’s campaign brought the case to the TSE. “Meta AI, the artificial intelligence engine that powers all Meta-managed platforms — Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook — is, in itself, biased and seeks, at all costs, to deliver results favorable to Flávio Bolsonaro, even when the same user insists on Lula,” 

At the same time, users are reporting an unprecedented wave of post removals, profile bans, and other restrictions. CTRL+Z launched a survey shortly after the runoff was set and has so far collected more than 

of accounts that were censored, blocked, or had features restricted or experienced sudden drops in reach. More than 90% are from Lula supporters. The cases reveal what appear to be serious moderation failures and false positives, including activist posts that are misclassified as child sexual abuse material or terrorism-related content.

Accounts belonging to social movements — including journalists’ unions; student organizations such as university student councils and LGBTQIA+ collectives, state-level chapters of the left-wing Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) — were banned without explanation and fan accounts for Madonna that had announced their support for Lula, some with over 100,000 followers, were taken down (some have since been restored). Accounts linked to the PT, Lula’s party, and the election campaign had their functionalities and reach restricted.

The majority of complaints, however, involve feature restrictions and sudden drops in reach, which have affected ordinary citizens as well as major influencers — in some cases, by up to 90%. Instagram profiles of journalist Leandro Demori, and of musician Baco Exu do Blues, both critics of Bolsonaro, are among the prominent personalities who saw dramatic declines in their metrics.

Regarding the CTRL+Z survey, which was used as the basis for the Federal Prosecutor’s Office to open its investigation following a request by a coalition of CTRL+Z, Article 19, Conectas, Sleeping Giants Brasil and others, Meta objected that it had not been given access to the full dataset and responded to a request for comment saying that “a deliberately selected sample does not reflect the scope and rigor of our content moderation work, which is aimed at ensuring equal treatment across our platforms for all. We operate in compliance with applicable law and electoral regulations.”

Superior Electoral Court faces accusations of bias

As evidence against Meta piles up, civil society is demanding action from the Superior Electoral Court. The court’s president is Kássio Nunes Marques, a justice appointed by Bolsonaro who is 

 in the Banco Master case, Brazil’s biggest corruption scandal in recent years, including with 

 that he participated in a prostitution ring run by a banker named Daniel Vorcaro, who is currently in jail.

Flávio Bolsonaro also faces allegations of links to Vorcaro. His potential election could impact the future of investigations, possibly benefiting those involved.

In the first round, Nunes Marques made no controversial rulings. In the runoff, however, he moved to suspend “Exército do Lula” (Lula’s Army), a pro-Lula support WhatsApp group created by federal congressman André Janones, also of the PT, that had gathered 3.3 million members in just a few days through coordinated campaign actions. 

, the channel promoted disinformation and instructed users to act as “bots.” The far-right candidate himself, however, also has a similar group with the same types of content, which 

remains active despite violating TSE rules.

Nunes Marques’ decision caused friction among the justices, 

 by the TSE’s inspector general, Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva, on the grounds of protecting freedom of expression, provided that those responsible for the channel refrain from disseminating or reproducing illicit content.

But the war of rulings continued. Two days later, again at the request of Bolsonaro’s party, Nunes Marques overturned Cueva’s decision and 

 the WhatsApp channel for 48 hours, arguing that it failed to comply with Meta’s terms of service. Before the period expired, however, the 

 after meeting a registration requirement.

In this context, Justice Nunes Marques has been 

Bolsonaro’s campaign in his rulings, and may face a disqualification motion filed by the Brazilian Association of Jurists for Democracy. PT’s president, congressman Rui Falcão, 

 to the Supreme Federal Court on grounds of Nunes Marques’ partisan bias.

to collect additional reports of “digital censorship”. Separately, 

 the TSE to demand that Meta immediately restore unjustifiably blocked content and banned accounts; provide special protections for the profiles of journalists, news outlets, and social movements; end the apparent practice of 

; and be transparent about the numbers and criteria behind its removals.

With a decisive election in the presidential race just days away, whether Brazilian institutions can extract answers — and where necessary, action — from Meta is an open question. The answer will matter far beyond Brazil.

James Ball is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

The United Kingdom’s election watchdog is developing an AI-powered system designed to notify candidates of significant deepfakes within three hours of posting to social media, the organization’s chief executive said.

In wide-ranging comments at a panel discussion at the

 Conservative Party’s annual conference

 last week, Vijay Rangarajan, the chief executive of the Electoral Commission, also warned of persistent hacking and phishing attacks against the regulator and said it had detected signs of “algorithmic bias” — a form of electoral interference that would likely require the involvement of a social media company itself — in at least one UK election.

The Electoral Commission is the UK’s independent regulator which enforces laws on donations to political parties, political advertising, and other legislation around the administration and conduct of elections. Rangarajan, a former diplomat who served as the UK’s ambassador to Brazil, has been its CEO since 2024, but public interventions from him — outside of evidence sessions to the UK parliament — are relatively rare.

deepfake video circulated during Ireland’s 2025 presidential election

 that falsely depicted candidate Catherine Connolly announcing that the election had been called off and that she was withdrawing from the race. The video urged supporters not to vote. In reality, of course, Connolly had done no such thing, and in fact went on to 

“If that happens to the British election, that will move a significant amount of votes,” he said, adding that it was not the Electoral Commission’s role to arbitrate rival claims made by candidates during the cut and thrust of a campaign, but rather to focus on statements such as this one that could undermine the administration of the election itself.

To address that risk, the commission conducted a pilot program during the UK’s local elections in May 2026, Rangarajan said. “We ran a full pilot, analyzed about three million posts through an AI,” he explained. “So, this is a good example of how AI can work: 147 bits of content were flagged. Humans then looked at those — not a terribly pleasant job in some cases — ten were really quite misleading, and we referred to the social media companies or to the police.”

Rangarajan stressed these posts “didn’t really have a giant effect at this point,” but added: “the fundamental point is we now at least have a system in place to be able to help voters, and help the media, and help parties cope with what I think is an absolutely certain attempt to use some of these deepfakes against the UK.”

Taking action to find the perpetrators of such deepfakes, and to bring them to justice where possible, was something the public were keen to see, he noted, but typically would be the work of weeks or months even where it was possible — meaning it would usually happen only long after an election was over.

Because of that, the Commission’s approach was “perpetrator neutral,” he said, and instead focused on making candidates and parties aware of deepfake content affecting them within three hours of it being posted — “because that's the sort of time for it to go viral” — to leave them and other authorities to respond more swiftly.

The pilot showed how such a program would work in practice: an AI would analyze posts in real time and flag them to Electoral Commission staff, who would review them and notify candidates or parties of those meeting its thresholds, ideally within three hours of the content making its first appearance.

Rangarajan said the challenge reflects the difficulty of applying laws written for an earlier era to modern election campaigns. It is often said that UK authorities are left to try to manage 21st-century elections in the digital era, with 20th-century laws written for the analog ones. “We were set up originally to deal with money and people, systems like that. It's all about information now,” he said.

“We have to then sometimes simply act in this place, obviously within our legal remits, but try to understand how law which was passed in 1983 or 2000 can apply in 2026 because it's very out of date.”

Discussing this phenomenon, Rangarajan disclosed his belief that at least one social network was displaying signs of “bias” at election time, though he did not disclose which.

He described a scenario in which a platform’s algorithm changes its recommendations during an election, showing users posts from people with one political viewpoint while suppressing those with another.

If “at election time, that algorithm happens to change without any warning, and it's proposing to you some of your neighbors with a certain political point of view, and not others, it's suppressing one bunch, and it's proposing another. You will think that your neighbors have changed [their minds]. That will influence a lot of people,” he explained.

“That is algorithmic bias, which we think we have detected to some extent already in some of the social media campaigns,” he continued. “I think that one is one for which, to be honest, there is no legislative solution in the UK's toolbox at the moment for that particular set of issues.”

 have raised concerns about the prominent role X, in particular, plays in UK politics, after its owner Elon Musk openly 

embraced far-right political movements in the UK

British politicians have expressed concerns

 over the continued Chinese ownership of TikTok’s operations outside the United States.

In response to a question from Tech Policy Press on attacks against organizations trying to protect or maintain trust in elections or other democratic processes, Rangarajan disclosed the pace of attacks faced by the Commission, before suggesting his organization was unlikely to be the best one to tackle such threats.

"We run about [...] 30 to 40,000 attacks a month, often peaking at 10,000 a day at times. That's cyber-attacks, big botnets, thousands of emails, phishing attacks, all around,” he said.

"I would very much like to see a much more sovereign capability doing this. It's not obvious that the Electoral Commission is the place to do major social media monitoring. I think others could do it better, as long as that is indeed usable by us and spread more broadly.”

The Electoral Commission’s role, he said, is to enforce the UK laws as they exist, and to issue guidance to candidates and parties on how to follow them — but it is also empowered to make recommendations on those laws and how they should be modernized, in the hope that MPs act upon them.

In context, and cumulatively, Rangarajan’s remarks contribute to a clear request for UK elections to operate under modernized rules and perhaps even the creation of new offenses — even if at least some of those should not necessarily fall under the Electoral Commission’s remit.

Unlike the USA’s fixed election cycle, UK parliamentary elections can be called at short notice — the next general election has to happen by August 2029, but it could happen much sooner, should the prime minister wish it. Whether UK legislators can respond to the challenges Rangarajan sets out, then, remains a very open question.

In September, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Barranquilla, Colombia, to meet with President Abelardo de la Espriella and to sign memorandums of understanding on critical minerals and nuclear cooperation. The visit was part of the Secretary of State's 

 and marked the highest-level official US visit to Colombia in years, following a period in which bilateral relations had stalled amid repeated tensions between former Colombian President Gustavo Petro and US President Donald Trump.

 and the US on four critical minerals: rare earth elements, lithium, copper and tungsten. It includes exploration, processing and trade, as well as cooperation on geological surveys and the incorporation of environmental, social and governance standards. The memorandum is non-binding, and 

according to Colombia’s Foreign Ministry

, it creates no legal obligations, grants no mining rights over specific deposits and explicitly recognizes Colombia's sovereignty over its natural resources. Any projects that eventually emerge from the agreement will remain subject to the procedures and approvals required under Colombian law.

According to the State Department, the memorandum states that within six months of its signature, the two countries will begin identifying potential projects and exploring financing mechanisms. These could include guarantees, loans, equity investments and government purchase agreements. Its figures on the concentration of global supply chains are 

. Based on data from the US Geological Survey and the International Energy Agency compiled by SunSirs Commodity Group, China produced 67,000 of the world's 85,000 tonnes of tungsten in 2025, nearly 80 percent of global production. It also accounts for approximately 60 percent of global rare earth extraction and nearly 90 percent of separation and refining. Chinese smelting and processing of rare earths represents 94 percent of the global total, while its share of global copper smelting stands at 47 percent.

A history of Colombia US cooperation and its benefits

The memorandum could be good news for Colombia. Rather than viewing bilateral cooperation through a simplistic model in which the Global North benefits while the Global South merely bears the costs, it is important to recognize that cooperation with the United States has historically contributed to Colombia's economic and institutional development.

International cooperation has played an important role in Colombia's modernization. As Luis Guillermo Vélez Cabrera 

 when discussing the opportunities that opened for the coffee and railway sectors, international engagement has been central to Colombia's development. From the modernization efforts associated with the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s to the institutional and security cooperation strengthened through Plan Colombia at the beginning of this century, the relationship with Washington has been an important pillar of Colombia’s national development.

The challenge now is to ensure that this new phase of cooperation creates more than an export economy based on critical minerals. The success of this new bilateral cooperation will depend on whether Colombia can avoid repeating the environmental and social costs associated with past extractive models. The country's 

 with large-scale coal mining in La Guajira and Cesar offers a difficult precedent. Intensive extraction has affected local communities, altered watersheds and generated serious environmental and public health concerns without always translating into structural development or equitable distribution of benefits.

The hidden material costs of the AI economy

To understand the significance of the memorandum, we need to look beyond AI software, algorithms and generative models, and toward the physical infrastructure that makes them possible. AI is not immaterial. It depends on massive data centers, large amounts of energy and global supply chains for critical minerals such as rare earth elements, copper and lithium.

At the same time, Colombia should take advantage of the opportunities created by the emerging technological economy. The objective should be to establish environmental and social safeguards from the beginning, rather than treating them as obstacles to development.

A regional example illustrates why this matters. When Google launched its first Latin American data center in Quilicura, Chile, the facility brought over 

, improved regional connectivity, and catalyzed 

. However, when Google proposed a second data center in Cerrillos, its planned groundwater consumption sparked strong 

 to an air-cooled system, a landmark February 2024 ruling by Santiago's Second Environmental Court 

 the project’s permit, requiring a full reassessment of aquifer impacts. Google 

 the original proposal to submit a fully air-cooled design. More recently, community groups 

, demanding that it be subject to a full environmental review. This Chilean experience shows that technological infrastructure can adapt to local ecological limits, setting a vital regional precedent for Colombia as it seeks to attract tech development while enforcing safeguards from the outset.

The lessons from Chile suggest that Colombia's cooperation with the US should not be limited to extracting and exporting critical minerals. It should also generate knowledge transfer, domestic value chains and higher value added production, while respecting the rights of local communities. If Colombia is to become part of the technological economy built around these resources, it should seek to capture more of the value that its minerals make possible.

An opportunity for science and industry in Colombia

Colombia should approach this new phase of cooperation with the US from a position of confidence, not suspicion. American cooperation has been invaluable to the country’s institutional, economic and security development, and this memorandum could open a new chapter in that relationship. But Colombia also has decades of experience with extractive industries whose environmental and social costs offer lessons that should not be repeated as the technological economy expands.

Projects developed under this framework will have to comply with Colombian environmental law and respect the rights of affected communities. In Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories, that 

includes the constitutional protections surrounding prior consultation

. These safeguards should not be treated as obstacles to investment, but as part of the institutional framework needed to make development legitimate and sustainable.

The larger challenge, however, is economic. Colombia has too often participated in global commodity chains primarily as a supplier of raw materials, capturing only a fraction of the value generated further downstream. This memorandum offers an opportunity to change that pattern. Cooperation with the US should bring not only investment and access to markets, but also scientific knowledge, technology transfer, industrial capabilities and opportunities to develop higher-value activities within Colombia.

If critical minerals are among the foundations of the AI economy, Colombia should aspire to contribute more than the resources beneath its soil. It should seek the knowledge and capabilities needed to participate in the industries those resources make possible. Chile has demonstrated how a country with abundant mineral resources can become a major player in global supply chains, and Colombia has no reason to assume that it must remain behind. Its potential, including significant deposits of copper, nickel, rare earth elements and other strategic minerals, combined with its geographic position and industrial base, gives it the opportunity to develop a meaningful role in the emerging technological economy.

The real opportunity is for Colombia to use these resources to build knowledge, industry and technology at home. If it gets this right, the country can become part of the industries that are shaping the AI economy, rather than simply supplying the materials they depend on.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin and European Commission President Ursula von der speaking during a press conference in the Main Quadrangle at University College Cork, as Ireland begins its presidency of the EU Council. Photo: Liam McBurney/PA Wire IRISH (Press Association via AP Images)

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March 10, 2026: US Customs and Border Protection officer walks through a busy airport terminal concourse with travelers in Miami, Florida. Shutterstock

March 10, 2026: US Customs and Border Protection officer walks through a busy airport terminal concourse with travelers in Miami, Florida. 

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