Articles
Maturity of the Regulatory Framework for AI in Ecuadorian Higher Education
Abstract
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, has transformed teaching, research, and higher education management at a pace that outstrips the responsiveness of Latin American regulatory frameworks. This study diagnoses the maturity level of Ecuador's regulatory framework on AI in higher education and identifies its critical gaps. A systematic analysis was conducted on 81 regulatory instruments (pending laws, regulations, resolutions, guidelines, and institutional policies) registered in the Regional AI in Education Observatory of the Erasmus+ GENIAL project, as of May 2026. Instruments were coded using a six-dimension framework (actor, object, mechanism, purpose, approach, and maturity) and synthesized into the Regulatory Maturity Index (RMI), which weights regulatory quality. Ecuador achieves an RMI of 70.6/100 (very high level), ranking third among the 28 countries in the Observatory. However, this leadership stems from the breadth of the corpus and university-level activity rather than ecosystem consolidation. Half of the instruments remain at the stage of a declaration of intent, and maturity is the most lagging dimension. Institutional-level instruments account for 87.7% of the corpus, revealing a bottom-up regulatory construction in the absence of specific national legislation. Administrative and data-protection domains concentrate 70.7% of the instruments; only 7.3% explicitly regulate generative AI. A differentiated policy agenda is proposed for CES, the Ministry of Education, CACES, and higher education institutions.
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