University of Latvia's Senate-Approved AI Regulation for Academic Integrity

In 2024 the University of Latvia (Latvijas Universitāte, LU) — the country's largest and oldest university — published its first "Guidelines for the Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Study Process," endorsed by Rector Prof. Gundars Bērziņš. The guidelines were built on principles of "safe, transparent, traceable and non-discriminatory" AI use and explicitly required that "in any situation in which artificial intelligence is used in the preparation of work, it is clearly indicated" — i.e., mandatory disclosure. They were designed to complement, not replace, the university's existing Regulations for Academic Integrity and Academic Ethics Codex.

Following 2025–26 amendments to Latvia's national Law on Higher Education Institutions, the University of Latvia's Senate approved a binding regulation on AI use in the study process, effective 16 March 2026 — reported as one of the first Senate-level AI regulations at any Latvian university. The regulation is built around four principles — integrity, transparency, responsibility and data security — and again makes disclosure of AI use in coursework mandatory, framing AI as a permissible "assistant" rather than a substitute for a student's own work. An updated companion set of guidelines, with worked examples of acceptable and unacceptable use, accompanies the regulation, alongside plans for staff professional development on AI-informed teaching methods.

This is a governance and assessment-integrity measure, not an evaluated pedagogical intervention: no compliance-audit results, violation statistics or learning-outcome data have yet been published, and its real-world effectiveness once in force from March 2026 remains untested. Its significance lies in being a concrete, principle-based, disclosure-enforcing regulatory model — developed in two stages from voluntary guidance (2024) to binding Senate rule (2026) — that other institutions can reference; Turība University in Latvia has separately led a related cross-border AI-and-academic-integrity project with partners in Lithuania, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Croatia and Turkey, developing shared guidelines and free training materials for lecturers.

Read the full analysis: https://hyperight.com/university-of-latvia-moves-to-regulate-generative-ai-in-the-study-process/