US officials encouraged other countries to adopt a light-touch approach to AI regulation at the G20 Innovation Ministerial, which concluded yesterday, and China reportedly signed a set of principles to this effect.
Axios notes there may be some disagreements within the US executive branch over what exactly this looks like, reporting tension between the Department of Commerce and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
The G20 (a forum where the world’s major economic powers coordinate on international issues) holds several meetings throughout the year; this year’s are hosted by the US. During the meeting in North Carolina this week, OSTP Director Michael Kratsios pushed for the adoption of “the Carolina Principles,” which, according to Reuters, encouraged countries to “avoid writing entirely new regulations for AI, and instead focus on writing rules for ‘novel’ situations involving the technology.” The text of the Principles has not been released, so it’s unclear what exactly this means. It’s worth noting that these are non-binding principles floated during a ministerial-level coordination meeting, and that what happens at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in December will carry greater political weight.
That said, Kratsios’s report that China signed the Carolina Principles, yet to be corroborated, is certainly newsworthy. While I wish this were an agreement for tighter governance rather than looser, if China did in fact sign, I’m tempted to (speculatively) interpret this as at least a small signal of willingness to cooperate with the US on AI governance more broadly. Since the principles are non-binding, it doesn’t matter much whether China follows them, so signing could in fact be a symbolic gesture of cooperation more than an actual commitment to lighter-touch domestic regulation.
Why encourage other countries not to regulate if the US thinks regulation blocks innovation and wants to “win the innovation” race? Part of the answer may be market share. If countries adopt EU-style regulations, American companies might have to jump through more hoops to ensure they can provide their services abroad.
If expanding the market for American AI is a primary motivation, I’m not overly concerned about the Carolina Principles influencing the regulation of frontier AI development. The kinds of regulation that could make it difficult to sell existing products are different from those that would ensure AI isn’t pushed well beyond safe limits. That said, it’s disappointing that the executive branch has so far chosen to (at least publicly) ignore signals from Congress in the aftermath of the Hugging Face attack that we might like a bit more regulation with that innovation, please. The G20 could have been a path to discussing global governance standards to address the increasing risks of this novel technology, and a place to start talking about an international framework in the spirit of Bill Gates’s recent suggestion.
I’m also disappointed by Reuters’s reporting, which states that the light-touch approach is in line with the wishes of the major AI companies, most of which are American. This seems to ignore Anthropic’s stated policy views, which include “support[ing] the development of a robust global evaluation ecosystem that includes independent third-party evaluations and model testing by governments with appropriate technical capacity,” among other measures.
It also ignores repeated calls from OpenAI and Anthropic for government intervention. Anthropic and OpenAI both issued statements in June calling for mechanisms that could pause frontier AI development globally if needed (which would require an international regulatory body). In late July, both companies endorsed a petition from over 1000 employees which explicitly asked for the government to “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” While these calls don’t necessarily contradict a light-touch approach to current AI models, they at least seem relevant.
In my opinion, it’s high time the media updates their “US-races-with-China-at-all-costs-forever” narrative to start reflecting some of the changing attitudes. The more reliably the media recognizes genuine shifts towards global cooperation and governance, the more likely they are to take hold.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.