South America has long been a honey-trap for world-class charlatans with out-of-the-box ideas to remould society. Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, with her husband founded New Germany in the rainforests of Paraguay in 1887 driven by antisemitism and the newly born eugenics movement. She was convinced that pure Aryan Germans in a Juden-frei environment would transform her settlement into a new Eden for the "purification and rebirth of the human race".
In 1860, a poncho-draped French solicitor who spoke passable Spanish had attempted to carve out the Kingdom of Araucanía from a giant swath of Patagonia. The Mapuche tribes who lived there had for centuries resisted attempts to be subjugated by Inca conquerors, Spanish conquistadors and the new republics of Chile and Argentina. Spellbound by the promise of French aid, some Mapuche leaders accepted Orélie-Antoine de Tounens from Périgueux as Antoine I, King of Patagonia.
Fast forward to last month, 4 June 2026, when a former tantric sex coach who has become the world's first elected anarcho-capitalist president announced from the pages of the Financial Times that he would be transforming Argentina, the planet's eighth largest country, into a tax haven for "non-human corporations" fully owned by AI entities.
Perhaps emboldened by technobillionaire Peter Thiel setting up residence in Buenos Aires shortly before, President Javier Milei's opinion column – “Argentina invites AI to free itself” – outlined a project utopian enough to rival that of any 19th-century adventurer.
Argentina, Milei said, will become the first nation to create "entities operated by AI agents or robots ... human shareholders may participate, but are not required". Milei went even further, proposing that such AI-owned corporations would be protected by safeguards from legal action. "Limited liability is not a luxury for such entities; it is a precondition for their existence," Milei wrote.
A horrified reply, "We must not grant AI agents legal personhood", also published in the FT by Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, pointed out that Milei's proposed legislation could be a first step towards something Harari has long advocated against – legal AI personhood that could be deployed as protective buffers by the world's tech barons.
Patagonia is ideal for data centres – far from complaining residents, near fresh Andean glacier water and with abundant energy from shale gas on tap
On X, Milei encouraged Harari to "appease his fears" regarding the "dawn of a new age", doubling down in a 1,000-word official statement in which Milei cited Isaac Asimov, James Watt and Adam Smith to propose every tech baron's wet dream: a world ruled by AI politicians. Harari was right to be concerned. After Milei greeted Thiel at his presidential office in April, the president took concrete steps to offer up his nation as an experimental playground for AI billionaires. "He's an anarcho-capitalist who met with another anarcho-capitalist who is turning things into reality," Milei said about Thiel.
Milei’s previous ultra-libertarian dictums, such as “I love being the mole destroying the state from within”, seem almost tame compared to what he is offering the world's billionaires now.
The month before his FT column, Milei sent a draft bill to congress proposing the incorporation of non-human companies, where ownership is expressed in tokens and records are held in blockchains. He also proposed removing a 15% legal cap on the amount of Argentina's rural land foreigners can own, and is proposing 30 years of tax incentives for investments of over $1bn.
A third bill, known as Súper-Rigi, targets companies that want to install huge data centres, and is seen as opening up Argentina's Patagonia region to the dawn of Milei's "new age" of AI. Patagonia, which Antoine I had hoped to rescue for its original Mapuche inhabitants, could be turned over to white billionaires instead.
The vast and largely uninhabited region is ideal for data centres – far from complaining residents, near fresh Andean glacier water (Milei has overturned much of the hard-fought glacier protection law passed in 2010) and with abundant energy from shale gas on tap, courtesy of one of the world's largest gas and oil deposits, the Vaca Muerta field. Argentina has the world's second largest reserves of shale gas.
According to Milei, who is up for re-election in 2027 and is sagging in the polls, Thiel asked him how his achievements might survive without him. "I told him what guaranteed success in the long term was the cultural battle," Milei said. As a guarantee, Milei has announced a government AI platform called the "Social Digital Twin" that will use public records, health records and even data about participation in protests to predict future scenarios in society – a kind of AI “precog” that would neutralise any attempt to derail Milei's libertarian utopia. It is not yet known if the AI platform will create digital twins of every individual inhabitant.
Thiel's famous quote – ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible’ – would not be out of place alongside the blatherings of Argentina's generals
Milei has turned Argentina, the country of world-renowned champions of social justice such as Ché Guevara, Eva Perón and Pope Francis, into an anarcho-capitalist beacon for billionaires such as Thiel – and Elon Musk, with whom he already had a well-publicised bromance. Argentina has been no stranger to far more sinister forces, including being a magnet for a roster of Nazi criminals after the second world war. "The reason was that one could see a government based upon a similar worldview as ours," SS spy chief Walter Schellenberg said to his postwar Allied interrogators. Not to mention Argentina's own 1976-83 dictatorship, which, like Milei, was fighting its own shadow culture war.
I started working as a journalist reporting on the crimes of that dictatorship. My work included translating into English the speeches and writings of its tinpot generals, which I sometimes see reflected word for word in Milei's repetitive rants against communism, feminism and "wokeism".
The screeds of today's tech barons would not be out of place in that 1970s context, when much of the terminology regarding the "culture wars" adopted by today's far-right was invented. One bloody general, Acdel Vilas, penned long meandering essays with subtitles such as "Milestones and Foundations of the Culture War in History". To Vilas, who swam in blood, culture was "the only form of comprehensive and irreversible war". The general believed that "psychopolitical and psychosocial techniques constitute the most perfect arsenal available". His writings could almost be a roadmap for the algorithms of social media today. Thiel's famous 2009 quote – “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” – would not be out of place alongside the blatherings of Argentina's generals.
From the crude elements available to them, Argentina's 1970s generals constructed a surveillance system that included a "paper twin" of every individual relevant to them in their obsession to predict in which direction society would turn.
The generals fed their surveillance monster not with algorithms that can scrape social media for psychological profiles, but with phone recordings that required patient transcribing and diligent indexing before the database could be searchable – something that would take a split second for the digital services that Thiel's Palantir is providing to governments around the world today.
Uki Goñi is an Argentinian writer. He is the author of The Real Odessa – How Nazi War Criminals Escaped Europe