Commerce Sec. Lutnick and Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown speak at G20 meeting — 9/2/2026

Summary

At a G20 Innovation Ministerial, Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown discusses how rapidly improving AI capabilities and exponential demand are driving an unprecedented data center and compute buildout. He identifies compute, power, permitting, and construction labor as bottlenecks and argues countries can capture growth by enabling data centers. Brown also highlights collapsing AI model costs and accelerating economic value, supporting broader AI adoption. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick frames the policy ask as rolling out a red carpet for investment.

• Tom Brown outlines rapid AI capability gains, exponential demand, and unprecedented industrial buildout.
• He says compute and data centers are the main bottleneck for AI progress.
• Brown highlights a shortage of power and construction labor for data center builds.
• He argues data centers can bring jobs, tax revenue, and additional grid power.
• Brown says frontier AI economic value is doubling roughly every six months.
• He notes model access costs fell about 20x in a year for equivalent intelligence.
• Brown predicts AI could reach once-in-a-generation scientist-level capability within 12 months.
• Howard Lutnick urges G20 partners to roll out the red carpet for investment.