Xi Jinping’s call for international cooperation on AI signals that a new geopolitical contest is taking shape. For the Caribbean and wider Global South, access to AI is not enough. Meaningful participation requires ownership, institutional authority and influence over the rules without being confined to choosing between competing Chinese and American technological systems.

Development reports often present the Caribbean’s challenges as technical problems requiring more investment, exports, integration and resilience. But what disappears when history and power are removed from the diagnosis? This essay asks whether familiar policy prescriptions can transform economies shaped by extraction or whether they simply help us manage the same structures until the next report is published.