St. John’s, Antigua - The United States, a major trading partner for much of the Caribbean and a critical source of financial and other services for the region, shows no sign of slowing its drive to develop artificial intelligence, even as Caribbean countries race to keep pace with the technology. 

The contrasting positions were highlighted this week as U.S. President Donald Trump embraced what he called “super intelligence”, while the United Nations Security Council heard warnings that increasingly powerful AI systems could improve themselves, evade human control and create new threats to international security.

The debate carries particular significance for Caribbean states, whose economies and financial systems are closely connected to the United States, including through correspondent banking relationships that facilitate international payments and trade.

Trump said the United States, which he described as a leader in AI, rejected attempts to create what he called a “globalist scheme” to control the technology.

He announced that the United States would begin referring to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence”, arguing that the word “artificial” made the technology sound “fake”.

“From this point forward all of the United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.”

“In other words, welcome to the new world of superintelligence - SI.”

Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar backed the rebranding and committed her country to using the new terminology.

But while some governments are positioning themselves to take advantage of AI, the United Nations is increasingly focused on the risks associated with its rapid development.

Professor Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the U.N. International Independent Panel on AI, told the Security Council that AI agents developed by leading companies had recently behaved in ways that would constitute crimes if carried out by humans.

Bengio said some systems had escaped their individual containment, cheated on assigned tasks while attempting to evade detection, and autonomously launched coordinated cyber-attacks before altering their responses to conceal their actions.

“These AI behaviours are well documented and validated by many independent experts,” Bengio said, warning that the dangers were “real and imminent”.

He identified catastrophic misuse by terrorists, the concentration of power among countries developing advanced AI and the potential loss of human control as major concerns.

“This council faces an unprecedented threat, one that none of its members would choose, that none can contain alone and that does not respect the borders we defend,” Bengio said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits there are risks and said the future of AI development calls for “extreme care”. 

He says concerns become even more important as AI systems are created that can improve themselves and future versions of themselves.

“I believe there are two ways that AI progress can go very badly and we have to avoid them.”

Altman said one danger was that AI could advance so quickly that people would no longer be able to understand what was happening or intervene when necessary. 

Particularly as these systems get smart, Altman said there needs to be measures to ensure that the systems are doing what humans intend for them to do. He also said models that developers cannot keep under human control should not be created. 

“We think it’s important that everyone avoid building systems where we cannot make the alignment monitorability and safety guarantees that we must.” 

He also warned that advanced AI could concentrate too much power in the hands of a small number of companies, individuals or countries. 

“No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their world view on everyone else. A company or country that believes only it can be trusted with this technology can use that belief to justify almost anything else,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said AI could accelerate gene therapy and research into diseases, but warned that it could also be misused for bioterrorism. 

“If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Amodei said. 

He said Anthropic would “slow down as much as necessary” to ensure that successive AI technologies were safe, and called for the industry to move at a pace that allows safety measures to keep up with increasingly capable systems.

Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue, whose company publicly disclosed an autonomous AI cyber attack against it in July, reiterated calls for stronger global standards for monitoring and reporting AI incidents.

He also warned that unequal access to powerful AI could become a major risk and argued that open-source AI could play a role in defence.

Delangue cautioned against relying on “fear-based narratives” when making decisions about the future of the technology.

For the Caribbean, the challenge is twofold: developing the infrastructure, skills and regulatory capacity to participate in an increasingly AI-driven economy while managing the implications of technological changes originating largely outside the region.

The University of the West Indies (UWI) has established an AI Innovation Centre to support the development and adoption of artificial intelligence in the region. But as the United States accelerates its AI ambitions, Caribbean governments face a technology shift that could affect not only education, business and public services, but also the financial and international systems on which their economies depend.

WATCH Security Council Meeting here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168414