Israel just turned a presidential handshake in Jerusalem into a diplomatic vehicle it hopes will carry its AI industry across a region that Washington has mostly left alone for decades.
On April 19, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Argentine President Javier Milei stood together in Jerusalem and launched what they're calling the Isaac Accords, a framework built explicitly on the model of the Abraham Accords but aimed south instead of east. Argentina signed a counterterrorism memorandum, opened a $150 million credit line for Israeli businesses operating inside the country, and agreed to a direct El Al route between Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires starting in December, the airline's first ever service to South America. Buried inside that package sat the piece that matters most for where this is heading: an AI cooperation memorandum between Israel's National AI Directorate and Argentina's National Secretariat for Innovation, Science and Technology.
That memorandum isn't symbolic language. It commits both governments to sharing supercomputing infrastructure, coordinating AI deployment across civilian sectors, and running joint research and training programs, according to the terms published by Israel's government press office. For Milei, who has spent the past year positioning Argentina as Latin America's most AI friendly government, it's the diplomatic scaffolding under a much bigger bet. He's already proposed a new legal category of non-human corporations, companies run by AI agents rather than boards of directors, and told the Financial Times he wants Buenos Aires to become for artificial intelligence what Amsterdam was for the age of sail.
Milei isn't stopping at Argentina's borders.
Between June 28 and 30, the Israel Allies Foundation and the American Friends of Isaac Accords ran a three day Latin America Chairmen's Conference in Buenos Aires. More than 20 lawmakers from 14 countries showed up, and before it wrapped they signed a resolution inside the Argentine parliament backing an expanded version of the Accords. Brazil, Colombia and Chile are named as the next likely members, with El Salvador, Ecuador and Paraguay also in the mix, according to reporting from Jewish Insider and JNS.
Ecuador is a useful test case for why the timing works in Israel's favor. President Daniel Noboa, fighting a cartel war that was killing someone roughly every hour at the start of 2025, asked Israel and the UAE directly for intelligence support, a request Noboa confirmed to AFP. That's security cooperation, not AI licensing, but it's built on the same premise driving the Argentina deal: governments that see Washington's attention wandering and want a technically sophisticated partner who isn't the United States, isn't China, and doesn't come with the EU's compliance paperwork.
That's the actual pitch, and Israeli industry knows it. A recent analysis in Ynetnews described Latin America as a market seeking automation, cybersecurity, supply chain and robotics solutions here and now, not sometime in the distant future, pointing to Mexico's rise as the world's 13th largest economy and a wave of nearshoring pulling manufacturing out of Asia and into Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic. None of that requires a government accord. But an accord makes the sale easier, and it gives Israeli firms a diplomatic door that Chinese and European competitors don't currently have in Buenos Aires, Quito or San Salvador.
Back home, the pressure to find that door is real. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett said this week that Israel risks falling behind in AI infrastructure even as its international standing erodes, comparing the technology to electricity rather than software and warning the government against depending on outside powers for every layer of the stack, from chips to models to energy. Frankly, that's the same anxiety showing up on two fronts. Israel wants sovereign AI capacity at home, and it wants friendly, low friction markets abroad while the U.S. China rivalry closes off the largest ones.
None of this has produced a single startup with a signed Latin American contract and a headline valuation yet. What exists so far is government scaffolding: an MOU, a credit line, a conference resolution, a list of countries waiting to sign on. Whether Israeli AI companies actually convert that into paying customers in Buenos Aires, Quito or San Salvador is the part nobody can verify yet. The accords just made it a lot easier to try.
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