The European Union and the United States continue to pull in opposite directions on artificial intelligence, with Washington urging other governments to loosen constraints at a recent Group of 20 ministerial meeting.
On Tuesday, the US hosted a G20 “innovation” meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where it put forward arguments against AI-specific regulations.
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Michael Kratsios, a tech adviser to US President Donald Trump, called for countries to instead embrace the so-called Carolina Principles, which advocate for regulations that do not single out specific technologies.
“Policymakers do not need to approach each innovation in isolation and should not treat every emerging technology as a first-of-its-kind policy problem,” Kratsios said.
Such appeals are part of Trump’s overall approach to making the US “the world leader in artificial intelligence”. He has led a campaign to slash regulations, including in AI development.
Kratsios was joined at the conference by top US tech leaders, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla’s Elon Musk.
They, too, argued for fewer constraints on AI’s expansion, while also focusing on the infrastructure needed to sustain the technology.
Zuckerberg said the build-out of data centres would demand “hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions” of skilled tradespeople, but his company was struggling to meet that demand.
Musk, meanwhile, pointed to the need to bolster electricity production for AI, with the technology’s energy requirements slated to outstrip the capabilities of energy grids.
“There will be a significant power shortfall next year, not [the] distant future,” Musk said.
Musk also directed some of his remarks at European regulation, denouncing what he considered the restrictive policies undertaken by some of the leaders present at the meeting.
Innovation, he argued, requires entrepreneurs to be “relatively free of regulation, meaning that new things must be default legal as opposed to default illegal”.
European countries, he said, had taken the opposite approach. “Things are generally default illegal,” he said. “It slows it down quite considerably.”
On the same day the meeting was unfolding in the US, the European Commission confirmed it had sent information requests to more than 30 AI companies worldwide, a preliminary step that could lead to formal investigations into whether they are complying with the bloc’s AI Act.
The act was billed as the world’s first comprehensive effort to regulate AI. It prohibits certain AI activities deemed to pose an “unacceptable risk”, while imposing transparency standards on other AI services. The transparency rules took effect in August.
European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said that Tuesday’s requests focus mainly on safety and copyright compliance.
The information requests were announced over the weekend by Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s vice president for tech sovereignty, in a post on LinkedIn.
“Our goal is to ensure that AI in Europe is developed, released and used safely and transparently,” said Virkkunen, who attended Tuesday’s G20 ministerial meeting.
She added that Brussels is “ready to take all necessary steps” to enforce compliance with the AI Act.
The push follows a string of incidents in recent months, including OpenAI’s admission in July that its models had autonomously hacked into a coding platform during security tests.
Another AI company, Anthropic, made a similar announcement that same month, acknowledging that its systems had gained unauthorised access to outside organisations during testing processes.
