Venezuela is poised to quickly acquire Chinese AI-enabled surveillance tools. The Venezuelan government has signed an agreement to acquire them, and officials have stated their intention to integrate them into Venezuela’s current surveillance regime.
This could further entrench Venezuela’s already formidable surveillance capabilities. The Chinese government is the globally recognised leader in deploying new AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), to deepen surveillance and repression within its own borders. Under President Nicolás Maduro’s autocratic leadership, Venezuela emerged as one of the most advanced adopters of Chinese-made surveillance technology in the Western Hemisphere, embedding digital monitoring tools deep into the daily governance of the state.
Now Venezuela is primed to upgrade its surveillance technology. This report shows that in the months before Maduro’s capture by U.S. forces in January 2026, the Venezuelan government signed an agreement to adopt Chinese-built AI systems, an initiative led by Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez, and signalled its intent to use Chinese AI to enhance existing state-sponsored surveillance.
The US has installed Rodríguez, who once supervised Venezuela’s repressive intelligence agency, as the country’s acting president. Under her leadership the Venezuelan government has neither liberalized nor dismantled the surveillance regime.
If Caracas continues to implement its plan to use Chinese AI for surveillance — and it has given no signal that it won’t — Venezuela will become one of the first countries outside China to import China’s new generation of LLM-based AI systems for surveillance and control, and the most advanced adopter in the Western Hemisphere.
This report finds that the state’s laws and institutions have already been shaped to accommodate this ambition, and that leading Venezuelan politicians have stated it openly – both to enhance its domestic surveillance system and to counter weapons of Western “cognitive warfare.” The report also carefully maps out how Chinese AI could enhance and more tightly integrate existing surveillance systems.
These findings serve as a call to action at a key turning point in Venezuela’s trajectory. It’s not too late to prevent the further entrenchment of technology-enabled surveillance there.
