AGU asks Brazil’s Supreme Court to strike down most of the betting law in ADI 7749

Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office (AGU) has asked the Supreme Federal Court (STF) to declare the core of the country’s fixed-odds betting framework unconstitutional, in a move that would put most of the sector’s legal basis at risk. For PSPs, acquirers, and banks, the important part is not the rhetoric; it is that the government is now formally attacking the regime it spent years building.

1. The filing, signed electronically at 16:22 on Friday (2) by Attorney General Jorge Messias, responds to a request from Justice Luiz Fux, rapporteur in Direct Action of Unconstitutionality (ADI) 7749, brought by the Prosecutor General’s Office. The AGU asks the court to invalidate articles 29 to 35 of Law No. 13.756/2018, which created the betting format, and articles 1 to 21, 22 to 24, 25 to 40, 43 to 48, and 54 of Law No. 14.790/2023. In practice, that covers almost the entire law that regulated the sector.
2. The AGU’s main theory is “insufficient protection.” Its argument is that the two laws’ “regulatory liberalism” caused “intolerable” harm to families’ financial and health integrity. The filing goes so far as to say that “the dragon” was untamable. That is the sort of language you use when you are not merely asking for tweaks to licensing rules, but for the legal foundation itself to be pulled up by the roots.
3. The text is a reversal from the AGU’s position in ADI 7721, a similar case. Back then, it said the rule was “still constitutional, subject to a process of progressive unconstitutionality,” and argued that the new framework should be monitored for “a reasonable period.” Now it says that period has passed and that the indicators show “persistence and worsening of the damage.” The filing says the regulated market has been operating “since 2024,” although the authorized market only began operating on 1 January 2025.
4. One gap matters here: in 2024, the AGU warned that invalidating the law could create “an even more serious scenario than the one challenged in the initial petition.” This time, it seeks to strike down the 2018 law as well, but does not explain what would happen to betting demand after the legal framework is removed. For operators and payment providers, that is not a philosophical omission; it is the bit that determines whether activity continues in a gray zone or gets pushed back toward the unlicensed market.
5. The filing also leans on Article 103, § 3 of the Constitution, which says the attorney general defends the challenged act, while the AGU asks the court to uphold the claim instead. The STF allows that flexibility, but the political signal is obvious enough: the Executive is asking for the collapse of a regime it regulated itself. The document is written entirely in the past tense, saying the laws “enabled,” the regime “was extensively flawed,” and the rule “forbade,” and it does not mention Provisional Measure No. 1.394/2026.

On the health side, the AGU’s main number is a 140% increase in SUS treatments under codes F63.0 and Z72.6 between January 2018 and December 2025. Seven of the eight years in that series came before the regulated market existed, and the AGU itself limits the reach of the figure, acknowledging that the records “do not necessarily correspond” to the number of people affected. That is the kind of detail operators and PSPs should read carefully: the filing is trying to build a causal story from a dataset that, on its own terms, does not fully support one.