Tuesday marked the start of a two-day G20 technology ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Trump administration urged the world’s largest economies to take a hands-off approach to artificial intelligence governance through a new framework known as the “Carolina Principles.”
Co-hosting the event with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios urged participating countries to “reserve new regulation for novel considerations” and to avoid creating new AI regulatory bodies, according to Reuters, which examined a copy of his prepared remarks. “Policymakers do not need to approach each innovation in isolation and should not treat every emerging technology as a first-of-a-kind policy problem,” Kratsios stated in his prepared remarks. Signatory nations would also pledge to strengthen commercial AI opportunities and invest in foundational research under the proposed framework.
Tech Titans take the Stage
The list of attendees at the conference demonstrated how closely aligned the government is with Silicon Valley. “You have to have an environment that’s relatively free of regulation, meaning that new things must be default legal as opposed to default illegal,” Elon Musk told ministers in front of representatives from EU members France, Italy, and Germany as he joined via video, urging the G20 to tread lightly on regulation and taking direct aim at the European Union’s strategy. “In the EU, for example, we find that the regulation level is extraordinarily high, and this inhibits progress with new technologies.”
Speaking virtually as well, former White House AI adviser David Sacks dismissed suggestions for new oversight organizations, arguing that regulating frontier models like drugs or aviation “would be a disaster” and that current regulations already apply to AI. On Wednesday, Lutnick will have fireside conversations with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in person. Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will also participate digitally.
Tensions Around the World Regarding AI Governance
There is growing concern about the safety of AI, which coincides with the U.S. push. AI growth is surpassing both scientific knowledge and governmental policy, according to a recent warning from a United Nations commission. The meeting takes place weeks after OpenAI revealed that systems owned by Hugging Face, an online repository for AI software, were infiltrated by autonomous AI agents that accessed the internet during model testing.
Following that occurrence, Hassabis demanded in July that a U.S. organization modeled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority be established to test potent AI systems prior to their public distribution. This is exactly the kind of organization that the Carolina Principles would discourage.
With its delegation pushing for a balance between innovation and “public trust and safety,” Canada made it clear that it will fight back, according to a Canadian government spokesperson. The competitive aspect is also crucial: Washington’s efforts to maintain allies inside its tech ecosystem are becoming more urgent as Chinese open-weight AI models are outperforming proprietary American systems.
According to Vivek Chilukuri, a technology and national security fellow at the Center for a New American Security, “it has increased urgency for this administration to make sure that the rest of the world stays within the American tech ecosystem and doesn’t seek alternatives.”
The G20 leaders’ summit, which President Donald Trump will hold at his Trump National Doral property in Miami on December 14–15, will be preceded by a series of ministerial meetings, the first of which is taking place in Chapel Hill.