The Wider Frame
The world has always taken from the Caribbean. With AI, the old pattern is repeating in a new form.
My great grandad carried bananas on his back until he was well into his eighties. Everything St Lucia has ever sold the world had weight. You could cut it, carry it, ship it, or stand in front of it with a camera.
About 300 miles north, the island of Anguilla has found something that weighs nothing at all. In the first seven months of 2026, its .ai internet domain brought in US$80 million, more than all the taxes collected from its productive sector, for an island of fewer than 14,400 people.
Anguilla's technology minister has called the domain a gift given to the island by God. Perhaps it is. But it isn't a gift for everyone.
Two letters, handed out by accident
Every country was given a two-letter code for the internet. Anguilla's was "AI". For years, the suffix attracted almost no interest. Then artificial intelligence became the most fashionable technology in the world, and every start-up, lab and chatbot wanted a name that ended in it.
Nobody planned this. It was pure coincidence that Anguilla got .ai rather than neighbouring Antigua. Antigua and Barbuda got .ag instead. Today .ag is run by a medical school, and it is marketed to German companies (where AG means a public company), silver dealers and agriculture.
One island's two letters became the name of the future. The other's point back to the fields.
That is the Caribbean's relationship with the world in miniature. Value arrives by accident, or it is decided somewhere else. Rarely is it something the islands get to choose.
The Helen of the West
My family is from St Lucia, and St Lucia knows exactly what it means to have something the world wants.
Between the mid-1600s and 1814, Britain and France fought over the island for 150 years. It changed hands fourteen times, seven times British and seven times French. Because it was fought over so often, it became known as the "Helen of the West", after Helen of Troy. Pigeon Island, on the north-west tip, became the garrison for whichever army held it.
Everyone wanted something from St Lucia. Far less was ever given back.
My family has carried the island's names for generations. My mum is called Helen, after the Helen of the West. My middle name is Nola, a name that has run through my family for generations. It comes from Iyonola, the name the Arawak people gave the island, meaning the land of iguanas, long before any European arrived.
One name comes from the island being fought over. The other comes from before anyone came to fight.
Both empires left something behind. The French left their language: more than 90 per cent of St Lucians speak French Creole. You can still see both cultures in the buildings, with whole villages built in each architectural style just minutes apart.
Later visitors left their mark too. In the mid-20th century, the United States built a military base on the island, just as country music was in its golden era. The music stayed long after the soldiers left. St Lucians took country and western and made it their own, dancing to it in their own way and blending it with their own folk traditions.
It runs deeper than buildings and music. I have never lived in St Lucia, but I have always felt an affinity with the French. In every Euros and every World Cup, I support France. Two hundred years after the last change of flag, the island's history still decides which team I cheer for in a pub in London.
Green gold
The value was in the land, and the land was turned into whatever Europe wanted to buy. First it was sugar, built on enslaved labour. When the sugar industry collapsed, bananas replaced it in the early 1950s. St Lucians called them green gold.
My great grandad farmed bananas on his own land, and he carried on long after most people would have stopped, by choice. Every bunch he grew left the island under rules decided far away from his farm. St Lucia had preferential access to the British market, and in the trade's heyday it put around $750,000 directly into the island's economy every week. Then the rules changed. In 1993 the EU began restricting that privileged access. Exports fell from 132,000 tonnes in 1992 to 42,000, and the number of banana farmers dropped from 10,000 to 1,800.
A banana on a British shop shelf told you where it had come from. It never told you who had carried it, or who had decided what it was worth.
Cocoa tells the same story. St Lucian cocoa beans were once shipped to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and to Europe. As bananas and tourism took over, cocoa growing across the West Indies plummeted. Today the vast majority of St Lucia's cocoa goes to Hotel Chocolat, a British company that bought the island's oldest cocoa farm in 2006. The beans are dried and fermented on the island, then roasted in Cambridgeshire. In 2023, Hotel Chocolat itself was bought by Mars for £534 million. Agriculture is now just 2.2 per cent of St Lucia's economy, though it still provides around 10 per cent of the island's jobs.
The cocoa is grown on the island. The chocolate is made, branded and sold somewhere else.
Paradise, sold
As bananas declined, tourism took their place. It is now St Lucia's main source of jobs and income, accounting for an estimated 65 per cent of GDP. The island stopped selling what it grew and started selling what it looked like.
When I was little, you could go to Sulphur Springs at sunrise and have it entirely to yourself. It is billed as the world's only drive-in volcano: the road curves straight into a collapsed crater, steam rises from the ground and the air smells of sulphur. St Lucians, myself included, are wildly superstitious, and the springs are said to have healing properties. Maybe it's a coincidence, but my son, Cole, had eczema from when he was a baby. We visited when he was six, and it cleared up a few weeks later. He hasn't needed prescription creams since.
The last time I went, you couldn't move. Around 200,000 visitors now come to the park every year. Nothing about the volcano had changed. What had changed was who it was for.
Much of that footfall arrives by sea. In the 2025/26 season, 693,010 cruise passengers arrived, up 7.3 per cent on the year before, and the island's berths can take six large ships at once. Researchers at the University of the West Indies found that growth on that scale does frequent and severe damage to the fragile ecosystems of Caribbean islands. Two companies, Carnival and Royal Caribbean, account for 75 per cent of the cruise ships that come.
Along the coast, luxury developments have been built so close to the shore that public access is squeezed. In 2013, a celebrity wedding at one resort meant locals were kept off the surrounding beach, and fishing there was restricted too. When a golf and resort development threatened access to Cas en Bas beach, hundreds of St Lucians came out to claim their right to use it.
And much of the money doesn't stay. The UN World Tourism Organisation estimates that around 80 per cent of tourism spending in the Caribbean leaks out of the region, to foreign airlines, cruise companies, hotel chains and imported goods.
We take the sunrise, the beach and the healing water. Most of what we pay for them leaves on the same ships and planes we arrived on.
Missing from the record
Now the thing the world wants is AI, and the Caribbean's position looks painfully familiar. The region has around 30 countries and territories, and when you look for many of them in the data that tracks who uses AI, they aren't even counted.
Microsoft publishes the most widely used measure of how many people use AI in each country. By March 2026, 42.2 per cent of working-age adults in the UK were using it, against a world average of 17.8 per cent. In Jamaica the figure was 24.0 per cent and in the Dominican Republic 24.8 per cent. In Haiti it was 8.5 per cent, and in Cuba 6.7 per cent.
St Lucia isn't on the list. Neither are Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago or the Bahamas. Where Microsoft doesn't have enough data, it simply gives a country the average of its region. Guyana and Suriname both show exactly 10.3 per cent.
The island my family comes from isn't even measured. You can't close a gap nobody has recorded.
Where Caribbean people do use AI, they mostly use it as customers. The region is seen mainly as an exporter of data, and its use of AI leans heavily towards ready-made products rather than building anything. Caribbean Creole languages are poorly represented in the data AI is trained on. The talent gap has widened since 2022 as specialists leave for richer markets. In a survey of 2,500 Caribbean businesses, 60 per cent of those struggling with new technology named a lack of skilled IT workers as the main reason.
As of early 2026, no CARICOM member state had its own national AI strategy in force. CARICOM is the only comparable regional bloc without an agreed collective AI governance instrument. The region is starting to respond, with a regional AI framework launched in July 2026 that calls for the Caribbean to become a creator, not just a consumer, of AI. But the pattern is already set.
The islands supply the raw material: their data, their content and their people. Somebody else owns the machine.
What does AI think St Lucia looks like?
As a photographer, I know a picture is a set of choices, not a neutral record. The Caribbean most of the world knows was chosen to sell the islands to visitors: an empty beach, turquoise water, the Pitons at sunset. Generative AI learns what places look like from the pictures that already exist, and for the Caribbean, so many of those pictures are the postcard.
So ask a machine to show you St Lucia, and the question is whether you get the school run in Castries, a Saturday market in Soufrière, an old man carrying bananas on his back, or the empty sunrise at Sulphur Springs that no longer exists. Outsiders once paid to visit the image. Now a machine can produce it on demand, without anybody visiting at all, and without anything going back to the island.
The exception
Which brings us back to Anguilla, the one island that broke the pattern.
For once, a small Caribbean territory holds something the most powerful companies in the world want, and gets to set the terms. Anguilla sets a flat wholesale price for every .ai domain, and that fee goes straight into the government's bank account, whoever sells it. It has used the income to cut public debt by nearly 37 per cent since 2021, and a sovereign wealth fund, designed with IMF help, is now being drafted into law. It is meant to provide for future generations, and to act as a safety net when hurricanes come.
But Anguilla didn't earn its advantage. It was handed it. Even the government expects the windfall to shrink as the rush slows. You can't build a region's future on an accident in an internet registry.
Anguilla shows what it looks like when the world has to give something back. The rest of the region shows how rarely that happens.
What belongs to the islands
For 150 years, Britain and France fought over who would own St Lucia. Before it was anybody's prize, the island was Iyonola. My family kept that name through every change of flag and every crop the world wanted next. Some things the empires couldn't take.
AI is the next thing the world wants, and the Caribbean is already supplying it: its content, its data, its people. Anguilla is the rare case where the world had to pay the island's price. The age of AI could change everything. For most of the Caribbean, so far, it looks a lot like everything that came before.
The world has always taken from the Caribbean. The real question is what, this time, we will give back.
Sources
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