B20 USA 2026

Built In, Not Bolted On: Ethical by Design SI/AI and the Competitive Edge of Trust

Cyber learned to build security in from the start and keep checking; this session asks what it takes to do the same for SI, building democratic values in by design and proving they’re there.

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  • When

    November 9, 202610:30 AM – 12:00 PM ET

  • Where

    B20 USA, Washington, DC

  • Format

    90-minute session

  • Organized by

    Harmonic Innovation Group

A Harmonic Innovation Group event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2026 B20, in partnership with the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue (KITDP) and under the High Patronage of the Embassy of Italy in Washington.

Harmonic Innovation Group Embassy of Italy in Washington Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue

The session

Abstract

Cybersecurity spent decades bolting protection onto products that were never built to be secure. Its answer, security by design, now adopted on both sides of the Atlantic, made builders responsible from the start, with monitoring kept as the backstop. SI faces the same choice: every model, closed-weight or open-weight, carries values shaped in training, and not every model carries the same ones; some are built to censor, surveil and mislead.

This session will examine trusted, ethical by design SI/AI, with democratic values such as transparency, accountability, rule of law and human dignity built in from training, then verified in use. This will also be explored in a dedicated keynote on how an explicit ethical code could guide SI development and evaluation under human oversight.

Trust creates a competitive edge when the builder, the technology, and its use withstand scrutiny; companies that demonstrate this will be adopted faster by businesses, governments, and citizens. Speakers from government and industry will discuss ethical by design and how models, open and closed, can prove this. The session closes with a call for industry-led standards that turn shared values into verifiable practice and competitive advantage.

Trust, but verify.

Panel and participants

The panel

The question

Cyber learned to build security in from the start and keep checking; this session asks what it takes to do the same for SI, building democratic values in by design and proving they’re there.

Participants

  • Opening and conclusion

    Janice deGarmo

    Chief Global Engagement Officer, Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue

  • Opening and conclusion

    Roberto Baldoni

    Founding DG of the Italian National Cybersecurity Agency

  • Panelist

    Emanuele Spampinato

    EVP and Co-CEO, Harmonic Innovation Group

  • Panelist

    Dustin Volz

    Reporter, The New York Times

  • Panelist

    Dmitri Alperovitch

    Chairman, Silverado Policy Accelerator

  • Panelist

    Brendan M. Peter

    VP, Global Deputy Head of Government Partnerships, Zscaler

The list of participants is being updated.

Why the cyber story is the right hook

Cyber took decades to put responsibility at the source. SI is moving faster.

Leading SI developers have already committed to pre-release testing and responsible development. As SI capabilities advance, how can we speed adoption of trusted SI by learning from cyber?

What cyber teaches

Four lessons for SI

  1. 1

    Build it in.

    Values should shape training and system architecture, complemented by runtime safeguards and continuous evaluation, just as secure code requires defence in depth.

  2. 2

    Keep verifying.

    By design never ended monitoring in cyber. It won’t in SI.

  3. 3

    Standards follow.

    Cyber went from principle to pledge to shared standards in a few years. Builders who move first help write them.

  4. 4

    Trust scales adoption.

    Builders who show their values are real earn a competitive edge in procurement, partnerships and trusted supply chains.

Hosts and partners

Who is behind the session

Featured by Harmonic Innovation Group. Harmonic Innovation Group features this session because its thesis is the Group’s own: technology built ethical by design, with the human person at the center, and the conviction that the self-regulation and growth of SI/AI should go hand in hand, not be traded off against each other. The Group brings its own Ethical by Design infrastructure, COLNISSAR, to the same standard the session sets for every builder: prove, not simply promise.

Read more

Harmonic Innovation Group Holding Benefit S.p.A. is an operating holding company founded in Southern Italy to implement globally a new innovation paradigm: Harmonic Innovation, conceived by its Founder, Francesco Cicione. The Group is building a global physical and digital ecosystem platform, powered by a broad collaborative community, that advances research and innovation through an ethical and humanistic vision, addressing development gaps and social inequalities in an era of major transitions. It is also committed to renewing the Made in Italy tradition, with particular attention to the geostrategic centrality of the Mediterranean.

In April 2026, the Group unveiled COLNISSAR (Cognitive Oriented Layered Noetic Infrastructure for Sapiential Systems and Anthropocentric Reasoning), the world’s first General Harmonic Artificial Intelligence infrastructure. Built on an “Ethical by Design” approach, it is intended to serve as the central nervous system of the Harmonic Innovation Ecosystem. Its proposed training pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning on expert-curated prompt–principle–response examples with Reinforcement Learning with Human Discernment (RLHD), using expert assessments of ethical alignment. At inference time, the MAGISTER guidance and evaluation layer is designed to retrieve source-linked principles, clarify user intent and assess generated responses, with human review and an audit trail. Evaluation on held-out ethical scenarios is intended to test adherence beyond the training examples.

Harmonic Innovation Group, whose Transatlantic Harmonic Foundation has just partnered with the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue University to introduce the Trusted Tech Accelerator, is a proud corporate partner of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2026 B20. Building on After Harmonic Innovation: Words of Hope for a Magnifica Humanitas, the international initiative promoted by Entopan and the Group on an ethical, human-centric future for SI, work, and business, the Group will host a featured B20 event showing that the self-regulation and growth of SI/AI should go hand in hand, not be traded off against each other.

The Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue (KITDP), founded by former Under Secretary of State Keith Krach, works at the intersection of technology, diplomacy and national security to advance trusted technology among democracies and their partners. Its Global Trusted Tech Standard (xGTT) is an industry-led, open governance standard that answers a question this session puts to every builder: can you trust the organization behind the technology? Rather than issuing verdicts, xGTT surfaces public evidence across 30 criteria, from red-line disqualifiers to governance, legal compliance, transparency and security practices, and it complements existing frameworks such as NIST’s. Where model evaluations test what a system can do, xGTT shows who built it and under what rules: trust, but verify. Four days after the B20, KITDP’s Trusted Tech Summit on November 13 brings countries together to endorse the standard.