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The Carolina Inn on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus is no stranger to the occasional high-profile guest. But on Wednesday, it was full of them.
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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, with a net worth of $3.3 billion. Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, with a net worth valued at $16 billion. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, with an eye-popping net worth of $195 billion.
These billionaire technology executives were in Chapel Hill for the G20 innovation ministerial event hosted by the Commerce Department and the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Inside the inn, it was all air conditioning, suits and respectful whispers. Outside the inn, angry, loud protesters screamed, sweated and clashed with UNC Police.
Say it loud, say it clear: Altman you’re not welcome here.
Up, up with liberation. Down, down with AI nation.
They’re crooked, they’re cowards. Send those tech execs to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.
Those were some of the chants at the Wednesday morning protest organized by student groups at UNC. Protesters marched from the Old Well to the Carolina Inn, the site of the G20 meeting.
Demonstrators took the opportunity to voice their frustration with various technological developments: flock cameras on campus, data centers across the state, and above all, the unregulated rise and manifold applications of artificial intelligence.
“We don’t want billionaires here,” said Mickey Brigham, a 26-year-old graduate student at NC State University who travelled from Raleigh for the protest. “We’re seeing how this technology is being used: surveillance, war, private profit, stealing people’s jobs for automation. And then of course, there’s the environmental impact of data centers. We will take any chance we get to show them that people don’t want this stuff.”
Many students voiced discomfort about this closed-door meeting of the “world’s most wealthy” taking place at a public university like UNC.
“We’re supposed to give input on these kinds of things,” said Dante McIntyre, a 28-year-old UNC student studying studio art. “We don’t want them here. They had no business coming here.”
For some, the problem is simple: “I don’t like rich people,” said Connor Wilkerson, an 18-year-old freshman political science major.
Many expressed the opinion that while AI isn’t inherently evil, it’s being used to pursue political and societal goals they don’t agree with. Much of that, some protesters said, is due to a lack of regulation.
The event also reflects, for some, what they see as the UNC administration’s pro-AI stance.
“I don’t think UNC is taking a sufficiently adversarial approach to the attacks on higher education that are happening in this country right now,” said Aidan Paul, a 27-year-old Ph.D student studying archeology. “I see the impact that AI is having on undergraduate education. It’s affecting students’ ability to critically think, to read and write on their own. I don’t think UNC is taking it seriously enough.
“They’re rolling out the red carpet. They have Sam Altman at the Carolina Inn. They’re all in there, boodling with each other.”
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The cries of the protesters were largely inaudible from inside the inn.
Altman and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sat down for a “fireside chat” over lunch, during which Altman shared his own origin story and his positive vision of AI — calling it “incredible magic of intelligence in a bottle.” He talked about how it can transform entrepreneurship and governance for the better, liberating people to pursue lofty ideas and better quality of life.
He compared artificial intelligence to electricity and fire: developments that revolutionized the world so thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine existence without them.
“We really do view what we are doing as a … service to the world,” Altman said. “We realize that different people around the world are going to use it very differently. We want to put sufficient constraints on our system to avoid catastrophic risks. But we really do want to respect all of your sovereignty, and you’re going to use it in very different ways. We personally may not like them.
“I don’t like everything that people do with electricity either, and I still think everybody should get to have it.”
Altman said that, like fire and electricity, AI will soon fade from the forefront of the national conversation.
“My prediction is we won’t be talking about AI as much as we do now in a decade, because we’ll just expect it everywhere,” Altman said. “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, really capable, and really helpful. We’ll just be so used to that, we won’t think about AI.”
For that to be true though, Altman emphasized the need for infrastructure — i.e. data centers.
“Even with great gains in efficiency, we are going to need to build much more infrastructure, unless we want this to be a highly priced model, which we don’t,” Altman said. “We want this to be abundant and inexpensive.”
Initially, Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s afternoon event was off-limits to press. But after Karp unexpectedly stopped to briefly answer questions from journalists, it was announced that he “so enjoyed” the experience that he then allowed his event to be livestreamed into the press room and let photographers inside.
Palantir is a controversial and powerful technology company known for its surveillance software used by governments to compile and analyze information about people. It does extensive work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Defense.
“Most people know Palantir. Or at least, we know you,” Karp joked at his event.
In the press room, Karp answered a question about his views on regulation.
“The problem with regulation is that it often hurts the countries that are trying to protect themselves,” Karp said, because if countries don’t use Palantir, he said they will likely rely on less secure systems instead.
“So you have to be very careful with regulation,” he continued. “One of the biggest problems is that it’s got to be done by people who understand the issues. And even people understand the issues, it’s very hard to see the downstream effects.
“That doesn’t mean there should be no regulation. I’m not an anti-regulation person. I’m a … Democrat. I’d like to be a Democrat again. We like regulation, but it’s very hard to do in practice.”
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This story was originally published September 2, 2026 at 2:53 PM.