After November: A Second Trump Term and Caribbean AI Policy

Note from the President

On November 5, the United States elected its forty seventh president. Whatever one's politics, the result will shape technology policy in the world's most consequential AI jurisdiction for the next four years, and that has direct and indirect consequences for our region. The Caribbean is not a passive actor in this story, but we are a smaller one, and small actors must read the room with care.

This month Andre Beaumont has written a sober and useful piece on what we should expect, what we should prepare for, and where the openings might be. As is our practice, Andre's piece is his own analysis and not an official CAIRA position. Where the Association takes a formal position, it does so through the Charter process and over the signature of the Board.

Two short items worth noting. First, our Working Group on AI in Health will publish its position paper on AI mammography for the CARICOM Health Ministers' meeting in December. Second, applications are open for the CAIRA Founders Cohort, twelve seats for Caribbean entrepreneurs building AI-native businesses, starting January.

Adrian Dunkley Founder and President, Caribbean AI Association

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Feature

After November: A Second Trump Term and Caribbean AI Policy

By Andre Beaumont

The Trump administration that takes office in January 2025 will not approach artificial intelligence the way the Biden administration did. That is a statement of fact, not of preference. The Biden Executive Order on AI from October 2023, which set out a mandatory reporting and safety testing regime for frontier model developers, is widely expected to be rescinded or substantially modified in the first weeks of the new administration. The Republican policy platform adopted in July is explicit on this point, and the president-elect's most prominent technology advisors have argued publicly for a lighter touch on domestic AI regulation paired with a harder line on technology competition with China.

Three implications matter for the Caribbean.

Implication one. The global regulatory leadership question is open again. With the United States stepping back, the European Union's AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, becomes the de facto floor for global AI regulation. For Caribbean firms that export digital services to the European market, and that is more of our firms than commonly recognized, the EU regime now drives the compliance work, not the US regime. CAIRA members operating in fintech, health tech, and tourism technology should treat the EU AI Act risk categorization as a near term operational matter, not a future possibility. The first general purpose AI obligations come into force in August 2025.

Implication two. The export control regime is hardening, and small jurisdictions get caught in the wake. The October 2023 expansion of US chip export controls, and the further tightening expected in 2025, applies extraterritorially in ways that are still being worked out. Several Caribbean states host data centres, financial services, and increasingly some AI compute capacity. Where that capacity uses controlled US-origin chips, and the operator has ownership ties to listed entities, our jurisdictions can be drawn into compliance positions that did not exist three years ago. Our financial regulators are familiar with US sanctions reach. Many of our technology and ICT ministries are not yet familiar with the equivalent reach of export controls. They will need to be.

Implication three. The bilateral aid and partnership programmes that funded much of our digital development work are likely to be reorganized. USAID and the State Department's digital programmes have been a source of capacity building, training, and infrastructure support for several CARICOM states over the last decade. The incoming administration has signalled both a reduction in foreign assistance budgets and a redirection toward strategic priorities defined in narrower terms. Caribbean ministries that have built work programmes on the assumption of continuous US partnership funding should pressure test those assumptions in the first quarter and identify substitutes. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Caribbean Development Bank, and selected bilateral relationships in the Global South are the obvious places to look.

Where are the openings.

There are several, and they are worth naming.

The first is the data centre opportunity. As US restrictions on advanced compute exports continue to evolve, US firms looking for politically stable, regulatorily compatible jurisdictions to host AI infrastructure within easy reach of the US east coast will have a small number of options. The Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Barbados, and the Dominican Republic each have some combination of legal infrastructure, fibre connectivity, and labour pool that could compete for a slice of this market. Whether the region wants this is a separate question worth a serious public conversation, given the energy intensity of AI compute and our existing power constraints.

The second is the safety testing and evaluation services market. With the US pulling back from mandatory federal evaluation, the private market for third party AI model evaluation is growing rapidly, and the skills required are not unique to Silicon Valley. A Caribbean firm with the right mix of statistical capability, software engineering, and bilingual or multilingual evaluation talent could win work, particularly evaluation of model performance on the languages and populations the major US labs underserve. Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole are commercially valuable in this work.

The third is policy export. CARICOM has, by stops and starts, built a body of regional regulatory craft on data protection, financial services, and digital services that several other Small Island Developing State groupings find useful. A pragmatic CARICOM position on AI, neither the maximalist EU approach nor the libertarian US drift, could be of real value to the Pacific Islands Forum, the African Union, and the South Asian regional bodies. We have not historically thought of ourselves as exporters of regulatory thinking. The opportunity is real if we will take it.

What should CAIRA recommend to our members and to the region in the first quarter of 2025.

First, do not let the US policy turn become an excuse to delay our own AI governance work. Whatever the United States does, the Caribbean still needs a coherent regional position on data protection, on cross-border data flows, on the use of AI in public services, and on the trustworthy procurement of AI tools by our governments. CAIRA's Charter Working Group expects to publish a draft regional AI charter for member comment in February.

Second, prepare for a more multipolar AI vendor landscape. Caribbean public bodies and private firms that built procurement policies around the assumption that the major AI tools come from a small number of US firms should plan for a world in which competitive offerings come from European, Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern firms as well. The technical and regulatory due diligence required for each is different.

Third, take the EU AI Act seriously now. Caribbean firms exporting digital services to the EU need to know whether their products will be classified as high-risk under the Act, and what that means for documentation, transparency, and conformity assessment. CAIRA's policy team has produced an introductory briefing paper and is available to support member companies on their first compliance review.

The Caribbean has spent decades navigating between larger powers whose interests do not always align with ours. AI governance is not the first such situation we have faced and will not be the last. The instinct should be familiar. Read the room, hold our own counsel, build the regional position, and use the openings the moment offers. We are not going to set the rules of this game. We are going to play it intelligently, and that is a different skill, one our region has practiced for a long time.

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Andre Beaumont is a regulatory affairs consultant based in Bridgetown and serves on the CAIRA Charter Working Group.

Originally published in The Monthly Intelligence Report, November 2024.