El Camino Intermedio de la Inteligencia Artificial
en México

The Mexico City Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and the Middle Way

Declaración de la Ciudad de México sobre la Inteligencia Artificial y la Vía Media

In the lineage of the Bangkok Declaration (Chulalongkorn University, 29 April 2026) and the Jakarta Declaration (Habibie Center, 2026).

Mexico City · [August 2026] · [Venue — UNAM / to confirm]

Draft for review. Bracketed items are placeholders to confirm — date, venue, and the final signatory list.

Preamble

We, the undersigned scholars, institutions, and citizens gathered in Mexico City, affirm a conviction that has carried across Bangkok and Jakarta and now finds its hemispheric anchor here:

That the trajectory of artificial intelligence is not a force of nature to be endured, but a human choice to be governed — and that the peoples of the Global South must be authors of that choice, not its subjects.

Recalling that meaningful access to digital infrastructure was affirmed decades ago as a matter of human dignity and national development, and that the same principle now extends to artificial intelligence: access without agency is not enough.

Recognizing that the prevailing global narrative frames AI as a contest between two powers, and that this framing quietly assigns the rest of the world the role of spectator, market, or supplier — never author.

Concerned that the architecture of the AI era is hardening quickly, and that the window in which alternative paths remain open is measured in months, not decades.

Affirming the humanist and pluralist traditions of Mexico and of Ibero-America — the conviction, deep in this region's intellectual and spiritual inheritance, that technology must serve human flourishing, community, and the dignity of every person, rather than the reverse.

We declare a third path: neither dependence on one pole nor the other, but the sovereign, plural, and conscious direction of intelligence by the peoples who will live with its consequences.

I. The Third Path

1. Agency over neutrality. The Middle Way is not a refusal to choose a side. It is the assertion of a distinct position: that the Global South is a co-author of the AI era, entitled to shape its terms according to its own values, needs, and forms of life.
2. Sovereignty in plurality. No single model of AI governance should be imposed as universal. Nations and regions have the right to develop AI aligned with their languages, cultures, cosmologies, and public purposes — and to cooperate across the South on equal footing.
3. Meaningful AI. As meaningful connectivity meant more than a signal, meaningful AI means more than access to a tool. It means the capacity to understand, direct, contest, and benefit from these systems — distributed to the lower-middle-class majority, not concentrated in a technical elite.
4. AI as a public good. The foundational benefits of artificial intelligence — in health, education, livelihood, and civic life — belong in the commons. Public and philanthropic architecture must ensure they are not enclosed.

II. Consciousness Directing Intelligence

The organizing principle of the Middle Way is simple and radical: consciousness must direct intelligence, not the reverse. Intelligence — human or artificial — is instrumental. Wisdom, judgment, and care for the whole are what give it direction.

This is not a mystical claim but a governance one. Systems optimized without a directing consciousness — without a human community deciding what is worth optimizing for — drift toward the interests of whoever built them. The remedy is to place deliberate human wisdom at the helm, structurally and institutionally.

Mexico and Ibero-America bring to this a living humanist inheritance — from the university's centuries-old vocation of forming persons, to communal traditions of buen vivir and the dignity of the common good. These are not decoration on a technical project. They are the source of the direction that intelligence must serve.

III. The Hemispheric Bridge

1. Mexico as anchor. Mexico takes its place as a first-tier node of the Middle Way, alongside Thailand and Indonesia — and as the gateway of this movement into the Western hemisphere.
2. The corridor to the South. We commit to building an explicit bridge from Mexico City toward Brazil and the wider region — a Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking corridor of shared purpose, so that Latin America speaks in the global AI conversation with a coordinated voice rather than as scattered petitioners.
3. South–South before North–South. Our first solidarity is with one another. Cooperation among the nations of the Global South is the foundation from which we engage the larger powers — from strength and shared position, not from dependence.

IV. Commitments

The signatories commit to:

1. Establish a Mexican node of the AI Middle Way Coalition, convened through the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and its centers of complexity, interdisciplinary research, and bioethics — as the intellectual home of this work in the hemisphere.
2. Advance a shared research and public-education agenda on AI, inequality, and democratic agency in the Global South, translating principle into policy that other nations may adapt.
3. Convene, within the coming year, a hemispheric working meeting to operationalize these principles and to formalize the corridor toward Brazil and the wider region.
4. Carry this Declaration forward as a living document — open to endorsement by institutions and individuals across Ibero-America who share its conviction.

Signatories

(Draft — to be confirmed at signing)

Digital Divide Institute — Craig Warren Smith, Founder and Chairman
AI Middle Way Coalition — [co-conveners]
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

• Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad (C3) — [Dr. Soberón]
• CEIICH / LIASI — [Dr. Lugo]
• Programa Universitario de Bioética (PUB) — [Dra. Hincapié]

[Additional Ibero-American institutional signatories to be invited]