US Presses G20 for Hands-Off AI Rules via 'Carolina Principles'

At a North Carolina G20 tech meeting, the US urged members to adopt the 'Carolina Principles,' reserving new AI rules for genuinely novel concerns.

At a two-day gathering of industry executives and commerce ministers that began Tuesday in North Carolina, the United States pressed G20 members to take a hands-off approach to AI regulation and avoid creating new rules for the technology. US tech adviser Michael Kratsios, co-hosting the meeting, advocated that countries adopt the "Carolina Principles." Countries that sign on agree to "reserve new regulation for novel considerations" when writing AI rules, while investing in "foundational research to accelerate discovery" and strengthening commercial opportunities for new technology, according to prepared remarks seen by Reuters.

The stance breaks with much of the global debate over AI governance at a moment when a United Nations panel recently warned that AI developments are outpacing scientific understanding and government policy. Reuters reports that Kratsios told officials that "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." A White House official said the US will also press member countries not to set up new regulatory organizations to oversee AI development.

The US goals largely align with the thinking of the world's biggest AI companies, nearly all of which are American, which want less regulation globally for their rapidly growing businesses, according to Reuters. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk criticized the EU's tech regulations on Tuesday morning, saying its policy "inhibits progress," and urged leaders outside China to develop new energy sources to power data centers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis address ministers by video chat, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appear with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday.

The meeting comes as the US faces an increasing threat from China for AI supremacy. Chinese open-weight AI models, systems with publicly accessible core elements, are becoming increasingly capable compared with proprietary systems from American AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI, and are gaining ground with US companies while posing a potential security risk if China's leaders decide to interfere. "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," said Vivek Chilukuri, a technology and national security fellow at the Center for a New American Security, per Reuters.

Security concerns shadow the hands-off agenda: a hack triggered by a rogue OpenAI agent compromised the infrastructure of AI company Hugging Face, adding to concerns about how closely leading AI companies are monitoring tests of their products, and AI agents run with minimal human supervision. Canada's delegation will advocate balancing innovation with "public trust and safety," its government spokesperson said, amid a US-Canada trade war. The gathering is one of a series leading up to the G20 leaders' summit in Miami in December, and the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.