Nearly a Dozen Caribbean Governments Finally Met on AI Rules in June. Most Are Already Behind

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Caribbean lawmakers coordinated on AI governance for the first time as a region in June 2026, in a room in Anguilla. Caribbean businesses had already been building with AI for years by the time that room filled up.

As of August 2026, no Caribbean government has passed a comprehensive AI law. Parliamentarians from nearly a dozen countries met in Anguilla in June to begin coordinating one, months after a regional survey found 85 percent of Latin American and Caribbean startups already use generative AI. Adoption arrived first. Governance is still being written.

That is the order the region is operating in: tools first, rules second. A Latin American and Caribbean startup survey published two months before the Anguilla workshop put predictive AI adoption at 75 percent alongside that 85 percent generative figure, mostly running without a written policy behind them. Naming that order plainly is the first step toward businesses protecting themselves while the law catches up.

What Actually Happened in Anguilla

From June 21 to 24, 2026, the Anguilla House of Assembly hosted a Caribbean AI Workshop. The Commonwealth Parliamentary Association's UK Branch, the UNESCO Office for the Caribbean, and ParlAmericas organized it, working with Anguilla's Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications, Utilities, Housing, Information Technology and E-Government Services. Parliamentarians from nearly a dozen Caribbean countries and territories flew in, alongside international partners. UNESCO walked the room through its AI Readiness Assessment Methodology and its Truth Yard fact-checking initiative. By the end of four days, delegates had drafted an outcome document committing their legislatures to build ethical, human centered AI governance frameworks at home.

I want to be fair to what that gathering represents before I get to what it does not. Small jurisdictions do not usually get to set the pace on global technology policy. A four island territory like Anguilla hosting the room where a dozen governments sat down together on AI, rather than watching a larger power write the rules and hand them down, is a genuine reversal of how this usually goes. That matters, and it is worth Caribbean readers knowing it happened, because most of the region's press coverage of AI still runs toward Silicon Valley product launches rather than what our own institutions are doing about them.

What the workshop did not produce is a law. An outcome document is a commitment among legislators to act, not an act itself. No CARICOM member state currently has a comprehensive AI statute on its books. The gap between a roomful of parliamentarians agreeing on principles and a parliament passing a bill that binds a bank, a hospital, or a government ministry to specific AI conduct is where most policy intentions in this region have historically stalled, and there is no evidence yet that this one will move faster.

The Adoption Number Nobody Is Regulating Yet

Two months before Anguilla, the Inter-American Development Bank published Startups x AI: An Overview of Artificial Intelligence Adoption in Latin America and the Caribbean. The report surveyed non AI native startups, businesses that use AI as a tool inside an existing product or process rather than companies built entirely around AI models. It found generative AI adoption at 85 percent and predictive AI adoption at 75 percent, concentrated in marketing, product development, and decision-making functions. The figure spans the wider Latin American and Caribbean region rather than Caribbean businesses alone, and the report is explicit that Caribbean coverage within that sample is thinner than Latin America's. Even discounted for that, it describes a business population that has already made AI part of how it competes.

Here is what that number means on the ground, in plain terms: a Caribbean accounting firm is already running client correspondence through a generative AI tool. A logistics company in Kingston or Bridgetown is already feeding shipment data into a predictive model to plan routes. A marketing agency is already generating first drafts of ad copy with a chatbot before a human ever reads the brief. None of that required permission from a regulator, because there was no regulator with anything specific to say about it. It required a subscription and a Tuesday afternoon.

That speed is not a flaw in Caribbean business culture. It is what happens everywhere AI tools get cheap and easy to reach before a legal framework exists to govern them. The flaw, if there is one, sits with institutions that have had two years of warning and have not yet converted that warning into an enforceable rule a single Caribbean regulator could point to today.

Two Years to Get Everyone in the Same Room

The warning is not new. UNESCO published the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Policy Roadmap in November 2024, built from input gathered across more than 1,000 institutions and individuals in 20 Dutch and English speaking Caribbean countries over eight regional meetings. It set out four pillars: culture and creativity, governance and transformation, upskilling and education, and resilience and sustainability. That is a serious, well consulted piece of regional planning, and it predates almost every AI governance conversation now happening in individual Caribbean parliaments.

It took nineteen months from that roadmap's publication to the Anguilla workshop, the first time legislators from across the region sat in a room together specifically to work through what applying it in their own countries would actually require. Nineteen months is not an unreasonable amount of time to move from a consultative roadmap to a legislative workshop in any government system. But it is also nineteen months in which the AI tools those same legislatures would eventually need to govern kept shipping new capabilities every few weeks, and Caribbean businesses kept adopting them on that same accelerated schedule.

This is the structural mismatch at the center of the story: consultation and legislation move on a government's clock, in years. Product adoption moves on a market's clock, in months. No region, Caribbean or otherwise, has fully solved for that mismatch. What distinguishes a region that manages it well from one that does not is how fast the gap closes once it becomes visible, and how much businesses protect themselves in the meantime.

The Investment Math Behind the Urgency

There is a financial reason this gap matters beyond the abstract question of good governance. The ECLAC-CENIA Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index, released in October 2025, found that Latin America and the Caribbean generate 6.6 percent of global GDP but draw only 1.12 percent of global AI investment. No country in the region reaches the world average for AI investment relative to GDP per capita, and the regional average sits roughly six times below that line.

Investors price regulatory clarity into every decision they make about where capital goes. A region with a written, predictable AI framework is a place an institutional investor can model risk against. A region where every jurisdiction might pass a different rule, or none at all, is a place where that risk is hard to price, so a lot of capital simply goes elsewhere by default. The Anguilla workshop and the roadmap behind it are not just civic housekeeping. They are, whether framed this way or not, part of the case the Caribbean has to make to close a 5.5 percentage point investment gap that has nothing to do with the region's talent or its ideas and everything to do with how legible its rules are to outside capital.

What This Means If You Run a Caribbean Business

I built StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, in Kingston in 2016, and I have spent close to two decades since then watching this region adopt technology in exactly this order: businesses move first, out of necessity or ambition, and institutions catch up when the pressure to catch up becomes public enough to demand it. AI is following the same pattern, just faster, because the tools themselves ship updates faster than any previous wave of enterprise technology did.

If you run a business anywhere in the Caribbean, waiting for a law before you touch AI tools is not a neutral choice. Competitors in your own market, and across the wider Latin American and Caribbean region, are already inside that 85 percent adoption figure. Sitting out does not protect you from the eventual rules. It only means you adopt later, with less internal experience, once everyone around you already has a head start.

The businesses that will handle the eventual law best are the ones building governance habits now, before a regulator forces the issue. That is the same principle behind Maestro AI Labs, an investment vehicle built specifically to back Caribbean AI ventures with the kind of disciplined structure that survives regulatory change rather than getting caught out by it. It is also why the free AI literacy training we run through Jamaica AI exists at all: the region's biggest governance risk is not malicious AI use, it is thousands of untrained decisions made by people who never had a chance to learn what a responsible AI workflow looks like before they started using one.

A Short Playbook Until the Law Catches Up

None of this requires a legal department a small Caribbean business does not have. It requires four habits, none of them expensive, all of them things a future law will almost certainly ask for anyway.

Write down what data goes into any AI tool your business uses, even informally, even in a shared document. If a regulator eventually asks what customer information touched a third party AI system, "we do not know" is the answer that turns a policy gap into a liability. Keep a human reviewing any AI output that affects a customer's money, health, or legal standing before it goes out the door, because every governance framework under discussion in the region, including the one UNESCO's roadmap describes, leans on human oversight of consequential decisions as a baseline requirement, not an aspiration. Choose AI vendors who can explain, in plain language, how their system reaches an output, since opacity is the exact thing most draft AI governance language singles out for extra scrutiny. And put one person in your organization, even a small one, in charge of tracking what AI governance news actually applies to your sector, because the region's rules are going to arrive unevenly, sector by sector and country by country, not as one clean CARICOM wide statute on a single date.

None of that is complicated. All of it is the difference between a business that adapts to whatever the Caribbean's eventual AI law requires and one that has to rebuild its AI workflow from scratch the week that law passes.

"Caribbean businesses did not wait for permission to start using AI, and they were right not to. That head start will not stop a law from eventually arriving. It only decides whether your business is already running clean when it does." - Adrian Dunkley, AI Boss

The honest reading of June in Anguilla is that it was overdue and worth having anyway. Nearly a dozen governments choosing to coordinate rather than legislate in isolation is a better outcome than fourteen incompatible national AI laws arriving over the next decade, one government at a time, each written without reference to its neighbors. It is also nowhere near finished. An outcome document is a promise. The Caribbean will know whether that promise held when the first CARICOM member state actually passes an AI law with teeth, not when the next workshop produces another well intentioned document.

Until then, the region's businesses are the ones actually setting the pace, whether they meant to or not. I would rather see them set it deliberately, with the habits above already in place, than get caught improvising the week a regulator finally shows up asking questions.