RD Inteligente: what the Dominican AI course teaches, asks for, and says in the fine print

On September 10 the Dominican Republic launched RD Inteligente, ITLA's free AI course for a million people. I read the program, the terms and the privacy policy: what it teaches, what it asks for, and three things worth knowing before handing over your ID.

On Thursday, September 10, Dominican President Luis Abinader launched RD Inteligente, the country's National Artificial Intelligence Literacy Program. The goal is to train a million Dominicans for free, and ITLA, the Instituto Tecnológico de Las Américas, runs it.

I went to rdinteligente.do and read what almost nobody reads: the full program, the terms of use and the privacy policy, updated on September 15. Here's what it teaches, what it asks for when you sign up, and what the fine print says.

What it teaches

The program is a three-level ladder, and each level stands on its own: whoever stops at the first one still walks away with something.

Level 1, literacy. Ten hours, the same for everyone, split into six "stops". You get a digital certificate from ITLA.
Level 2, productivity. A track for your line of work, because, as the page puts it, "a nurse and a judge don't need the same thing". You leave with an applied project.
Level 3, specialization. 60 to 120 hours in artificial intelligence, data science, cybersecurity or software development, with a "vendor certification".

These are the six stops of level 1, with their titles translated:

What AI is and what it isn't (1.5 hours)
Talking to an AI (2.5 hours)
Distrusting well (1.5 hours)
Your data and your privacy (1.5 hours)
AI scams: defending yourself (1.5 hours)
Your first real case (1.5 hours)

What I liked most: four and a half of the ten hours are about distrust. Of AI answers, of who you give your data to, and of scams. Stop 5 opens with a scene anyone recognizes: a call at 2:14 a.m., your mom's voice asking you to send money right now, and it isn't your mom. According to the page, thirty seconds of your voice is enough to clone it.

At the launch, the president summed it up: "We don't want to turn a million Dominicans into programmers. We want a million Dominicans to be better at what they already know how to do." The curriculum goes that way.

What it asks for

Your cédula, the Dominican national ID, and an email address. According to the FAQ, it then asks for your date of birth, your province, your neighborhood and the track you want. No phone number, and it costs nothing: not the sign-up, not the content, not the certificate.

The cédula serves two purposes, according to the program itself. One, checking against the voter roll of the Junta Central Electoral that the certificate goes to a real person. Two, one cédula per account, so nobody takes two spots. If the roll doesn't find you, you can enter your details by hand and keep going, but your file stays pending verification and they may ask for proof before issuing the certificate.

There's no password. To log back in you type your cédula and get a one-time code by email. The page says it plainly: your email is the key to your account. If your email doesn't have two-step verification, now is a good time to turn it on.

The level 1 certificate comes when you finish all six stops and answer every check. It's a certificate of participation: according to the terms, it "is not equivalent to an academic degree or a vendor professional certification". List it on your résumé as what it is.

What the fine print says

For a privacy policy, this one is clear: it says what it keeps, who else sees it, where, and for how long. It keeps four kinds of data:

What you type: your cédula, your email and, optionally, the track you identify with.
What the voter roll returns when your cédula is verified: full name, date of birth, sex, nationality, province and municipality. It says it doesn't receive your photo or your voting history.
Your progress through the course: which screens you saw, what you answered and whether you got it right, your progress and your score.
Technical data: your IP address, the date and time of your visits, your browser and your operating system.

On the technical side, it gets several things right:

The cédula is stored encrypted. Only its last four digits are kept next to it, and not even program staff see the full number: it shows up masked, like ***-*****-5678.
No cookies. The session lives in your browser's local storage: if you check "Remember me on this device", it lasts up to ninety days of inactivity; if you don't, it ends when you close the tab.
No third-party analytics or ad cookies, and the videos are self-hosted, so watching them doesn't tell any platform what you're watching.
Technical logs are kept for twelve months.

But there are three things worth knowing before you hand over your cédula:

Your data lives in the United States. The platform and its database are on a server there, and by signing up you authorize that transfer.
The service that verifies your cédula isn't named. The policy says it receives only the cédula, to check it against the voter roll, but it doesn't say which company or institution it is. It does name the other two providers: Microsoft's Azure Front Door, which sees your IP like any network intermediary, and Google Fonts, which gets your IP when the page loads its fonts.
The certificate record is forever. You can ask them to delete your file at any time by writing to info@rdinteligente.do from the email you registered with, a right that Dominican data protection law (Ley 172-13) gives you. But if you already earned a certificate, the record that it was issued is kept permanently.

What doesn't add up yet

Minors. The Presidency's announcement lists high school students among the program's audiences, but the platform requires a cédula, which Dominicans get at 18. The policy admits it: in practice the platform is for adults, and if minors are ever let in, it will be through a different mechanism and with parental permission.
Level 2 hours. The tracks section talks about fifteen hours after the six stops; the level ladder says 25. It adds up if they count the ten common hours, but the page doesn't say.
The level 3 vendor. It promises a "vendor certification" and doesn't say which vendor.
The date for the million. Neither the announcement nor the site says by when.

Who I'd send it to

My mom, my dad and my aunts and uncles, before my developer friends. Level 1 isn't for people who already use these tools every day. It's for people who could lose their savings to a cloned voice on the phone, and for them, stop 5 alone is worth the ten hours.

And one warning straight from the policy: the program never asks for a password, bank details or health information. In its own words: "If any form on the site ever asks you for them, it isn't ours." When something free gets popular, copies show up, and a lookalike link on WhatsApp asking for those things isn't theirs. The site is rdinteligente.do.

Sources: Presidency announcement, September 10, 2026 · RD Inteligente: the program and FAQ · Terms of use · Privacy policy

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