G20 tech takeaways: Lutnick pitches adoption of U.S. AI, pushes data center buildout

In an interview on the sidelines of the G20 summit, White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios told CNBC that Anthropic has continued to share its models with the U.S. government as part of the voluntary AI framework.

“We worked with them to test and evaluate their latest Fable 5.1 model, and that was released yesterday,” Kratsios said.

On the Trump administration’s relationship with Anthropic, Kratsios said it’s “in a good cadence where they’re open and they share the models with us, and they even put it through the paces at our safety and security institute.”

—Mary Catherine Wellons and Megan Cassella

Lutnick said he did not think Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping would discuss export controls during Xi’s state visit to Washington later this month.

“I don’t think so,” Lutnick said when asked if potentially loosening controls was on the agenda.

Lutnick said that Trump offered to sell certain chips to China, but “the Chinese haven’t really taken it up.”

“They have all sorts of worries, and you know, they haven’t bought them, so I don’t think it’s necessary because I don’t think it accomplishes what it was intended to do,” he added. “The president showed an olive branch, and it hasn’t been taken up.”

— Kevin Breuninger

Lutnick said that data centers will “bring prosperity” to the communities where they are built, and blamed their unpopularity on unspecified U.S. adversaries.

“They’re just getting a bad rap because our adversaries are trying to slow us down,” Lutnick said at a press conference.

Lutnick also pushed back on concerns that data centers use massive amounts of water by noting that almonds and cattle are among the top water-using industries.

“They’re not going to raise the cost of power in that community. They’re going to bring down the cost of power in that community, and they’re going to bring, because they’re going to create tremendous tax revenue,” Lutnick claimed. “They’re going to bring prosperity to those communities.”

Lutnick was asked by CNBC about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s remark a day earlier that tech companies need to do a better job explaining data centers to the American people.

“It is a good idea for these companies that are building these data centers to get out there and make this point clear,” he said.

— Kevin Breuninger

Palantir CEO Alex Karp said he expects that AI will come with some disruptive elements, but “I don’t believe in the doom message.”

Karp referenced “a certain company” in the U.S. putting out a daily AI doom message that scared people. The comment seemed to be a reference to Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, who has penned a number of blogs and made other comments about the risks of AI.

“It scares people because there are elements of truth in it,” Karp said, “but the elements of truth have been exaggerated to the point where it causes huge political problems.”

Karp has said in previous interviews that he considers Amodei a friend, but that he disagrees with many of his stances on national security and other matters.

—Chris Eudaily

Palantir CEO Alex Karp said that the AI revolution is not 100% good, adding that there are “huge dangers” to the technology as he singled out his concerns about wealth inequality.

“I think a big problem we have in this country is: I don’t think people are down for me being 20 times wealthier, “It leaves a bad taste in people’s mouth,” Karp said.

He noted that it is a “real issue for our societies.”

“I come from an academic family,” he said. “I’m not even sure how I ended up with all this money.”

—CJ Haddad

Palantir CEO Alex Karp dove further into AI regulation during his fireside chat with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, criticizing countries for not having technical experts leading AI regulation.

“My biggest criticism of regulation outside of America is: Please get technical experts to do it,” Karp said.

He said that currently, the application of regulation is coming from companies looking to deploy large language models. Those companies, he said, are “exfiltrating” a country’s alpha to the model providers.

“This is anti-sovereignty, and whoever’s telling you this works needs to be fired because they are hurting your country,” he said.

—CJ Haddad

AI is not the only topic of conversation at the G20 innovation summit.

Mexico’s economy minister Marcelo Ebrard told CNBC that he met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in Chapel Hill. The two discussed trade and tariffs, but Ebrard offered no further details on the conversation.

The meeting comes amid ongoing negotiations between the two countries on the USMCA.

Ebrard, in a post on X, shared a photo with Lutnick and praised the G20 as a “great initiative.”

—Megan Cassella and Mary Catherine Wellons

Palantir CEO Alex Karp took questions from gathered media ahead of his chat with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and said that AI regulation “hurts the countries that are trying to protect themselves.”

“One of the biggest problems is it’s got to be done by people who understand the issues. And even if people you understand the issues, it’s very hard to see the downstream effects. That doesn’t mean there should be no regulation,” Karp said.

“I’m not an anti-regulation person. I’m an unhappy Democrat. I’d like to be a Democrat again. We like regulation, but it’s very hard to do in practice,” he added.

—CJ Haddad

Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn’t sidestep.

“I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently,” he said.

Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas “could set this technology back a great deal.”

—Samantha Subin

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the public won’t be talking as much about AI a decade from now — it’ll be expected everywhere.

“A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful,” he said.

Alman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI.

“I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we’re not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we’re not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago,” he said.

— CJ Haddad

Altman told the gathered ministers and representatives that countries shouldn’t overlook the improvements to daily life poised to come from AI.

“I think it is non-negotiable that you have to use it,” he said. “The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore.”

—Samantha Subin

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his lofty ideas of what artificial intelligence models will mean for business owners.

“I think this, for example, will be the greatest boom in entrepreneurship and the creation and development of small businesses the world has ever seen,” Altman said in a chat with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

“If you have a great idea, but you didn’t have the resources or the ability to get enough capital together, or hire enough experts to work on it, or to figure out what it’s going to take to invent a new piece of science or manage a complex supply chain, you can do that with AI now,” he said.

— CJ Haddad

CNBC’s Megan Cassella has the latest reporting on the ground in Chapel Hill, where Trump administration officials have gathered with global tech ministers and executives.

The biggest topics of conversation in panel discussions and on the sidelines: AI regulation and data center backlash.

—Mary Catherine Wellons

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took a moment to chat with reporters on the sidelines of the summit, expanding on his AI comments from the earlier fireside discussion with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

“We’re at the beginning of an industrial revolution,” he said, adding that “America is going to lead by building the full stack.” Huang said that every country should be able to take part in the AI revolution.

Huang also shared his advice on how AI should be regulated. When asked about rules of the road for AI, he said that his advice would be “to regulate practical and actual harm, and not regulate theoretical and hypothetical harm.”

Huang noted that the technology is still advancing and “we want to make sure that the technology advances in a safe way.”

—Mary Catherine Wellons, Megan Cassella

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith pushed back on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s assertion that Canada torpedoed trade talks with the U.S. for political purposes.

“Everybody wants a trade deal,” Smith said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” when asked about Lutnick’s claim. “In fact, we’ve been hoping for one for a long time.”

Lutnick told CNBC earlier Wednesday morning that Canada made last-minute demands in their trade negotiations with the U.S. “for political reasons.”

Canada has likewise accused the U.S. of changing the deal terms at the 11th hour. But Smith dismissed the idea that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was trying to boost his chances in upcoming domestic elections.

“There are always elections going on, either at the subnational level or by-elections,” she told CNBC, noting that the U.S. also has elections coming up.

“People are going to get hurt” by the new U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods that took effect after the trade talks failed, she said.

“You might not see a blip on the GDP, but the impact in real persons’ lives — it’s enormous,” she said. “Yeah, there’s always going to be politics, but I don’t think that’s the overriding issue.”

—Kevin Breuninger

Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown said he “really loved” a post from President Donald Trump on data centers this week.

Trump’s controversial post made headlines for declaring that communities opposing the new builds must want to be “backwards and poor.”

“He was pointing out that the data centers are just an enormous source of prosperity. They produce a ton of jobs. They reduce taxes,” Brown said in a chat with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “The way that we design them, we actually bring on more power to the grid.”

Trump took aim at public backlash towards data centers in a Monday post to Truth Social, saying communities will be “successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place” if they embrace the opportunity.

“If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!” he wrote.

— CJ Haddad

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang told CNBC that he has “had no conversations” at the G20 related to the Trump administration’s forthcoming semiconductor tariffs.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” earlier Wednesday morning that tech giants are all aware that the Trump administration is working on a tariff framework for chips. He described the new import duties as a means to get companies to build their products in America.

Huang, in his remarks to CNBC on the G20 sidelines, praised Lutnick for being “really quite supportive of building in the United States” and suggested other countries should follow that example.

—Kevin Breuninger and Megan Cassella

The public backlash towards the AI buildout has leaders everywhere on notice.

“There is a lot more pushback in the communities across the U.S.,” Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel said in an interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick.

He added that the conglomerate would be interested in working with hyperscalers “if there was no impact to the rates of our other customers.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dismissed opposition to data centers in the U.S. as “propaganda by our adversaries,” while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blasted the companies themselves on Tuesday for doing a “horrendous job” of reassuring communities about the benefits of the AI buildout.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Tuesday that “too many” data center developers don’t care about the communities where the projects are being built.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many developers who don’t care about our communities, who are trying to run roughshod over our communities, and those are the kinds of data center projects we don’t want here,” Shapiro said in an appearance on “Squawk on the Street.” “We want to work with people that want to work with local communities.”

David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said that there’s “a good deal to be made here between local communities and data centers and the AI companies,” adding that he didn’t see a need for overregulation in an interview on “Squawk on the Street” that same day.

—CJ Haddad

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that AI is as foundational to every country’s development as core infrastructure.

“What every single country will have to do is you need to recognize that this is infrastructure, just as its water, roads, electricity, the internet,” Huang told Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in a fireside chat.

“Every single country needs to build infrastructure so that you could support your own local economy,” he said.

Huang referenced his favored “five-layer cake” analogy for AI, with energy at the bottom, followed by chips, data centers, AI models themselves, and data and applications.

The U.S. is “more deeply invested in inventing, building, developing the entire five-layer cake. However, every single region, every single country should decide which one of the layers they want to invest in,” Huang said.

“You don’t have to win in every single one of them. You don’t have to develop all of them. The most important part is that every single country should advocate for AI diffusion or the adoption of AI into your industries.”

—Kevin Breuninger

Lutnick claimed to CNBC that Trump’s reanimated tariff policies will usher in a wave of economic benefits, including raising domestic growth, shrinking budget deficits and tamping down spiking bond yields.

He spoke as the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield hit its highest level since November, 2023 amid a global bond sell-off.

U.S. tariff rates under Trump are already highly above historical averages, even after the Supreme Court’s February ruling that struck down Trump’s expansive “reciprocal” duties.

Lutnick blamed muted U.S. GDP in the second quarter on the high court’s ruling, telling “Squawk Box,” “Those tariffs came down, imports came flooding in.”

After the tariff collapse, “imports come flying in, starting February all the way through the next quarter,” resulting in a 1.6% reduction U.S. GDP, he said.

“Over the next couple of weeks, they’ll be all back in place, and you’ll see imports start to fall, and you’ll see GDP rise.”

He went on to claim that as Trump finds ways to reimpose the scrapped tariffs, the import taxes will bring in revenues as high as $400 billion a year, reducing America’s rapidly increasing budget deficits.

“You’re going to see the economy start to kick up again as we go back to above 3 percent and the growth rate and the reduction in the deficit will not only stabilize the bond market, will bring rates down,” Lutnick said.

— Kevin Breuninger

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called AI “the great equalizer’ and said the technology will democratize intelligence.

“Artificial intelligence will democratize intelligence and capabilities for the G20 countries,” Huang said in a fireside chat with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. “For the countries that invest in it, it’ll help elevate your society, elevate your industry much, much more quickly than you possibly could have imagined before.”

—Chris Eudaily

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick doesn’t believe the recent rise in Treasury yields is anything to be concerned about.

In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday, Lutnick said he thinks that a pickup in the growth rate of the U.S. economy, as well as a reduction in the deficit — which reached its highest monthly level in more than five years in July — will ultimately “bring rates down.”

“I’m comfortable with where things are,” he said. “I think what you’ll see is rates stabilize and start to decline over the coming, let’s say, six months.”

On Wednesday, the 10-year U.S. Treasury note yield hit its highest level since November 2023.

—Sean Conlon

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC that the Trump administration is working on a tariff framework for chips and all the companies know they are coming.

Lutnick confirmed a Politico report from last week that the White House was weighing the move.

“I think what you’re going to see is targeted, thoughtful tariff policy that basically says if you build here, you don’t pay, but if you don’t build here, expect to pay to enter the greatest market in the world,” Lutnick said.

The tariffs on semiconductors have been in the works for some time, but the administration hasn’t discussed what is being considered publicly.

“We will be successful in semiconductors. They’re going to be built in America,” he said.

—Chris Eudaily

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick doubled down on blaming Canada amid an ongoing he said-she said over which country is responsible for tanking a trade deal at the 11th hour.

Lutnick told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that Canadian negotiators started “adding crazy ideas to the mix” just hours before a deadline to reach a deal that would avert Trump’s 50% tariffs on Canadian goods from taking effect. He pointed to medium- and heavy-trucks for Canada’s ask on the Friday the talks devolved.

“And I said to one of the ministers, ‘Are you actually trying to blow this up?’ And his answer to me was, ‘I’m not allowed to say that,'” Lutnick said.

“They blew it up for political reasons only,” he said.

Canada has accused the U.S. of changing the deal terms at the 11th hour. Trump recently responded to Canada’s accusations by saying, “that sounds like me.”

Lutnick, reminded on CNBC of Trump’s remark, insisted that Canada was to blame. “You’re watching them play politics in Canada, and they’re just using us, and it’s it’s really embarrassing, actually,” he said.

— Kevin Breuninger

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the conversation around AI and data centers needs “a big reset,” blaming AI companies for doing a terrible job of being trustworthy messengers for the tech boom.

“I think that the AI companies, whether it is the builders of the data centers, whether it is the labs themselves, have done a horrendous job, horrendous job of explaining themselves to the American people,” Bessent said in comments Tuesday following the G20 meetings with finance ministers and central bankers in Asheville, North Carolina.

Bessent said the companies need to convince the American people that “all the benefits will not accrue to a small group” and will instead be spread evenly.

—Chris Eudaily

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said Tuesday that governments should seek to “make things default legal, not default illegal” to help foster growth, likening new companies to saplings in a forest.

“What most countries tend to do is they tend to provide too much support to the large existing trees in the forest, and not enough to the small saplings,” he said, adding that the regulatory environment “should be generally biased towards supporting” the small trees.

Musk, the world’s richest person, also made several bold predictions on the potential for AI growth and robotics.

“AI will probably increase the global economy by 20% to 30%” he said, adding that in 10 years he expects over a billion humanoid robots out in the world.

—Chris Eudaily

Former White House AI czar David Sacks addressed blowback against the AI data center buildout on Tuesday and said local communities can benefit from the construction projects.

“Data centers, if done right, they bring electricity costs down, not up, because the AI companies will generate net new power generation,” he said. “That’s really the key.”

Sacks, a venture capitalist who is co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, said if the companies are allowed to generate their own power, then excess can be sent back to the grid, bringing costs down. He also said companies can help pay for grid upgrades.

President Donald Trump on Monday blasted opposition to data centers, posting on Truth Social that any locale stonewalling the buildout must “want to end up being backwards and poor.”

Sacks insisted that it’s still a local decision.

“The federal government should not preempt the decision of states with respect to data centers,” he said. “It is fundamentally a local decision, and we respect that and have done nothing to change that.”

—Chris Eudaily