Carolina Principles

At the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill on 1–2 September 2026, the United States is asking the world’s largest economies to sign the Carolina Principles: a non-binding pact to reserve new AI regulation for genuinely novel issues and to avoid creating new AI regulators. This article sets out what the principles say, who is in the room with Musk, Altman, Huang and Hassabis, why Washington wants the pact now, the counter-arguments from the Hugging Face breach and the UN panel, how it compares with the G20’s own AI record, and what it means for UK and EU businesses.