Economic chiefs from some of the world’s largest economies are meeting this week in North Carolina, as meetings kick off ahead of the U.S.-hosted G20 summit in December, and it looks like the focus, unsurprisingly, will be on artificial intelligence. But while other foreign leaders are entering the summit with calls for increased global collaboration on AI regulation, the Trump administration is reportedly arriving with recommendations to back off.
According to a Reuters report from Tuesday, the United States’ goal from the upcoming G20 meeting between commerce ministers is to convince the countries in attendance to take a “hands-off” approach to AI regulation.
Currently, finance ministers and central bank governors are in Asheville, North Carolina. Today and tomorrow, trade and commerce ministers are meeting in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, for the “Innovation Ministerial,” which will be co-hosted by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trump’s tech adviser Michael Kratsios. Citing a White House official, Reuters reports that the American delegation at the innovation ministerial will press the leaders in attendance to refrain from inflicting more regulatory scrutiny on the AI industry, instead pushing them to sign a pact called the “Carolina Principles.”
Led by Kratsios, the Carolina Principles will have signatory countries promise to invest in “foundational research to accelerate discovery,” strengthen commercial AI opportunities, and to “reserve new regulation for novel considerations” when regulating AI, Reuters reports. In less bureaucratic English, that means the government wants the biggest economies in the world to refrain from creating AI-specific regulation unless in extraordinary circumstances, while asking them to remove any barriers that stand in the way of the companies that stand to make billions of dollars off of these new advancements.
“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 will say in his prepared remarks, per Reuters.
The Trump administration has championed a hands-off approach from the AI industry, one they argue is necessary to allow innovation to continue at a pace that can guarantee the U.S. beats China in AI advancements. Critics claim this underregulated approach only makes the AI companies richer while deeming AI’s economic, environmental, health, and social risks as collateral damage.
The United States isn’t the only country coming into North Carolina with a plan. Canadian officials attending the ministerial told Reuters that their delegation will be advocating for a balance between innovation and “public trust and safety.”
The Trump administration’s Carolina Principles would arrive in contrast to regulatory calls from major intergovernmental organizations. The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, for example, recently warned that AI development was outpacing rules and regulations, and compounding the technology’s risks.
“A technology that can reshape economies, transform the world of work, sway elections and tilt the balance of security is being deployed faster than anyone, including the people building it, can keep up,” Guterres said at an AI dialogue in July. “Innovation needs guardrails.”
AI will undoubtedly take a central position in the talks at the innovation ministerial and the rest of the G20 meetings. Ahead of the finance ministerial, which began Monday, the G20’s Financial Stability Board chair and Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey sent the attendees a letter warning that developments in frontier AI pose unique financial and cyber risks that can easily spread beyond borders.
At the innovation ministerial, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will host fireside chats with both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose ChatGPT is now facing tougher regulations in the European Union, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the two-day meeting, Axios reported last week, with Altman set to preview new advances in AI and their economic implications. Kratsios also said in a post on X that Elon Musk, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and the former White House AI adviser and venture capitalist David Sacks will address the attendees today, while Reuters separately reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be in the lineup as well.