No Caribbean Country Has an AI Law Yet. The Bahamas Wants to Be First.

TL;DR

• On 14 August 2026, Bahamas Minister of Innovation and National Development Sebas Bastian said public trust, not legislation on its own, will decide how fast the country adopts AI, as the government finalises its AI governance framework (The Tribune).
• The government named the Artificial Intelligence Governance Act a second-term priority in the 21 May 2026 Speech from the Throne. The Act would create a national AI Authority, and a National AI Committee announced in June 2026 is tasked with drafting it.
• Per DPO Caribbean's regional tracker, only one of CARICOM's 15 full member states, Jamaica, has a published national AI policy document. The other 14, including the Bahamas, currently have none.
• The Caribbean AI Task Force's July 2026 report, launched at the first Caribbean AI Forum in Trinidad, names a "connectivity paradox" across the region and lists regional AI governance among its five priority recommendations, the same gap Bahamian legislators are now trying to close at home.
• Right now, AI use in the Bahamas is governed only indirectly, through the Data Protection (Privacy of Personal Information) Act, 2003, a law written nearly two decades before ChatGPT existed.

Fifteen countries hold full membership in the Caribbean Community. As of this month, one of them has a published national AI policy. None has a dedicated AI law. On 14 August 2026, the Bahamas' Minister of Innovation and National Development, Sebas Bastian, told reporters that closing the second gap, not the first, is what will actually determine how quickly his country moves on artificial intelligence.

The Bahamas is drafting the Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, legislation the government named a second-term priority in its 21 May 2026 Speech from the Throne. If it passes, the Act would create a national AI Authority, making the Bahamas the first Caribbean country with a standing statutory body built specifically to govern AI, well ahead of any policy document currently in force anywhere else in the region.

That distinction, between a policy and a law, sounds bureaucratic until you trace what each one actually does. A policy tells a government's own departments how to behave. A statute with an enforcement authority tells private companies, foreign vendors and public agencies alike what they are required to do, and gives someone the power to check. The Bahamas is reaching for the second kind, and it does not yet exist anywhere in the English-speaking Caribbean.

What Minister Bastian Actually Said

Bastian's 14 August remarks were not the announcement of anything new. The Artificial Intelligence Governance Act had already been named as government policy in May, and a committee had already been formed in June to draft it. What made his comments notable was the framing: a minister publicly conceding, in the middle of writing an AI law, that the law by itself will not be what convinces Bahamians to trust it.

"The public trust is going to come in the form of how responsible we start to implement our AI practices," Bastian said, according to The Tribune. He went further: "Trust cannot simply be created through legislation, but must be built through transparency, inclusion, accountability." On the question of jobs, he described AI as a tool meant to support workers rather than replace them, a position consistent with earlier statements from Prime Minister Philip Davis, who told Bahamians in February that many "are not yet participants in this era and they are understandably worried about their jobs."

The government's stated plan pairs the coming legislation with a Private Sector Advisory Forum, drawing on business, technology, academic, civil society and legal input, and an independent oversight institution whose exact structure has not yet been finalised. Bastian's acknowledged concerns, privacy, security, employment and accountability, are the same four issues that show up in almost every public AI debate anywhere in the world. What is less common is a minister naming them out loud while the bill that is supposed to answer them is still being written.

From a Speech to a Bill: The Timeline So Far

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The Artificial Intelligence Governance Act first appeared as government intent on 21 May 2026, when Governor-General Dame Cynthia "Mother" Pratt read the Speech from the Throne opening the Davis administration's second term. The Act was listed alongside comprehensive cybersecurity legislation, a Government Digital Transformation Act requiring adoption of the MyGateway digital platform within three years, and a national digital ID system, part of a wider legislative slate aimed at Bahamian government services rather than AI on its own.

The concerns motivating the bill were concrete rather than theoretical. Bahamian reporting through the first half of 2026 documented students using AI tools to write essays and complete assignments undetected, and at least one case of an attorney submitting fake AI-generated court citations in support of a legal argument, the kind of episode that makes a government's appetite for a legal backstop considerably less abstract.

In mid-June 2026, the Ministry of Innovation and National Development announced the formation of a National Artificial Intelligence Committee, bringing together public service expertise, private sector representatives, the legal community, and outside international input, specifically to help draft the legislation. Whether an earlier expert committee, tasked in 2025 with drafting the country's first national AI policy, ever completed that work is not clear from public reporting, which is itself a useful reminder that a committee announcement and a finished statute are two very different milestones.

The Difference Between a Policy and a Law

Jamaica's 2025 result gets cited often, and for good reason: its National Artificial Intelligence Policy Recommendations helped the country reach 100th in Oxford Insights' 2025 Government AI Readiness Index, the only CARICOM state in the global top 100. But a policy document is an instruction to government, not a rule enforceable against a bank, an insurer or a foreign AI vendor operating in the country. It sets direction. It does not, on its own, create a regulator with the power to investigate, fine or compel disclosure.

DPO Caribbean, which tracks AI laws and regulations across the region, reviewed roughly twenty Caribbean and CARICOM jurisdictions and found exactly two with a published national AI strategy or policy document: Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic, which sits in the wider Caribbean but is not a CARICOM member. Every other territory it reviewed, including all fourteen of CARICOM's other full member states, returned the same finding: no substantive national AI document identified. The Bahamas, until its Act clears Parliament, sits in that second group.

What the Bahamas is attempting is a step past what either Jamaica or the Dominican Republic has done. A statute that creates a permanent AI Authority establishes an institution with a legal mandate that outlasts the minister who proposed it, staffed, funded and empowered to issue rules rather than recommendations. That is precisely the compliance terrain the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council was built to help Caribbean businesses and governments navigate, and it is one reason CAIRMC's governance frameworks have found an audience well before any single country had a statutory AI regulator to enforce them.

What the Region's Own Task Force Says Is Missing

The Bahamas is not writing this legislation in a vacuum, even if the connection is more coincidence than coordination. On 23 and 24 July 2026, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union convened the first Caribbean AI Forum on the University of the West Indies St Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago, and used it to launch the final report of the Caribbean AI Task Force, titled Toward Harmonized AI Policies and Recommendations for the Caribbean. The report was built by more than 35 nominated members drawn from CARICOM governments, national agencies, multilateral organizations, the private sector, academia and civil society.

The report's central diagnosis is what it calls the region's connectivity paradox: strong digital engagement across the Caribbean sitting on top of fragile infrastructure, high connectivity costs, fragmented regulation and thin data governance. Its five priority areas read almost like a checklist against the Bahamas' own bill: regional AI governance, data sovereignty and digital infrastructure, innovation and industry development, human capacity and AI literacy, and sustained multi-stakeholder engagement. Regional AI governance sits first on that list, and it is exactly the gap a statutory AI Authority is designed to fill at the national level.

Nobody involved in either process has described the Bahamas' bill as a response to the task force's report, and the timelines only overlap by a matter of weeks. What is worth noting is that the region's own governments, sitting in the same room in Trinidad in July, arrived independently at the same conclusion Nassau reached in May: that a strategy paper is not the same instrument as a governance authority, and CARICOM does not yet have one anywhere. The Caribbean AI Association has been making a version of that argument at the regional level for longer than the task force itself has existed.

Why This Matters Beyond Nassau

The Bahamas runs one of the Caribbean's largest offshore financial services sectors, and banks, insurers and fund administrators operating there are already using AI in underwriting, know-your-customer checks and fraud detection, largely without a dedicated legal framework telling them where the lines sit. A statutory AI Authority changes that calculation directly for firms headquartered or licensed in the Bahamas, and indirectly for every Caribbean business that competes with them or shares a regional regulator's attention.

Precedent moves fast once it exists. A CARICOM state without any AI-specific statute today is one board meeting away from a regulator, a client or an insurer asking why a jurisdiction next door already has one and it does not. Firms operating across more than one Caribbean territory will be watching how the Bahamas' Authority defines liability, disclosure and enforcement, because whatever framework it settles on is likely to become the reference point the rest of CARICOM's ministries measure their own drafts against, whether or not they say so publicly.

That is the argument Adrian Dunkley, founder of StarApple AI and the Caribbean's most consulted AI governance voice, has made consistently as President of the Caribbean AI Association and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council: governance clarity is not a cost businesses pay after they adopt AI, it is what determines how confidently they adopt it in the first place. Read more of his analysis of Caribbean AI policy at adriandunkley.net.

What Could Still Go Wrong

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The government's own language leaves room for delay. The structure of the "independent oversight institution" is still described as to be determined, months after the Committee was formed, and the status of the 2025 expert committee that was meant to produce the country's first national AI policy before this bill was ever announced remains unclear in public reporting. A second-term legislative priority is not a guaranteed outcome, and a Speech from the Throne is a statement of intent, not a tabled bill.

Bastian's own comments carry the same caution. A minister who says trust cannot be legislated is, by implication, warning his own government against treating the Act's passage as the finish line. A statutory AI Authority that exists on paper but is under-resourced, under-staffed or slow to issue its first rulings would do little more for public trust than the policy documents it is meant to improve on. The distinction between a law and a policy only matters if the law actually gets enforced.

What to Watch Next

Three markers will show whether this moves from a Speech from the Throne line item into something CARICOM's other fourteen full member states have to respond to. The first is whether the National AI Committee produces a public draft of the Act before the end of 2026. The second is whether the Private Sector Advisory Forum publishes anything substantive rather than meeting quietly. The third is whether the next Caribbean AI Forum cycle references the Bahamas' Authority as a working example rather than a proposal still in progress.

Until one of those happens, the ledger stays where Minister Bastian left it on 14 August: fifteen CARICOM states, one published AI policy, and zero AI laws with a regulator attached to enforce them. The Bahamas is the country currently trying hardest to change the second number. Whether it gets there before another CARICOM government beats it to the same milestone is the more interesting question the region's next AI Forum will have to answer.

Caribbean AI Governance Resources

StarApple AI works alongside a network of Caribbean AI organizations covering regional policy, governance and risk. For further context on this story:

• Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, on AI governance and risk frameworks for Caribbean businesses and governments
• Caribbean AI Association, the regional professional body coordinating AI policy and standards across CARICOM
• Adrian Dunkley, the Caribbean's leading AI strategist and founder of StarApple AI

StarApple AI, founded in Kingston, Jamaica in 2016, was the first AI company established anywhere in the Caribbean. Its founder, Adrian Dunkley, is the region's most cited AI governance voice, serving as President of the Caribbean AI Association and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council.

About the Author

Lancelot Williams is a policy correspondent who has covered Caribbean technology regulation and AI governance since 2023. He contributes regularly to the StarApple AI platform, tracking national and regional AI law, data protection and digital governance across the Bahamas, Jamaica, CARICOM and the wider Caribbean. Contact: insights@starapple.ai.