The United States will use a gathering of Group of 20 industry leaders and commerce ministers that opens Tuesday in North Carolina to urge members to take a hands-off approach to regulating artificial intelligence, according to a report by Reuters citing a Trump White House official.
The two-day meeting arrives at a pivotal moment for the global AI debate. Governments from Brussels to Brasília are weighing how — and how much — to regulate frontier systems, while the US faces what officials describe as an intensifying competition with China for AI supremacy. For readers following the latest AI developments, the message from Washington is unambiguous: no new global watchdogs. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI trends.
Who Is Hosting, and Who Is Showing Up
The meeting is being hosted by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House tech adviser Michael Kratsios, who previously worked at data and evaluations provider Scale AI. In a statement cited by Reuters, Kratsios said he would push for a "pro-growth vision for the future of emerging technologies."
The guest list reads like a cross-section of the American AI establishment. On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are scheduled to appear separately before the delegates alongside Lutnick. On Tuesday, the US plans to bring in SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Meta's Dina Powell McCormick, and venture capitalist and former White House AI adviser David Sacks via live video chat.
The format is itself a statement of philosophy: the industry's most powerful executives addressing government ministers directly, with the US acting as convener rather than referee.
What "Hands-Off" Means in Practice
According to Reuters, the US will press G-20 member countries not to set up new regulatory organizations to oversee AI development. That position aligns the US with a deregulatory posture at odds with the European Union's rulebook approach, and it signals that Washington intends to shape international norms through persuasion rather than treaty-style institutions.
For multinational AI companies, the practical stakes of that argument are hard to overstate. A patchwork of new international bodies, each with its own testing mandates and reporting rules, would mean duplicating compliance work across every major market. A hands-off framework, by contrast, leaves firms answerable primarily to their home regulators — and, for the moment, the US is signaling it prefers incentives to oversight. Whether other G-20 members accept that trade-off is one of the central questions hanging over the meeting.
The stakes are considerable. A United Nations panel recently warned that AI's development is outpacing both scientific understanding and government policy, per the Reuters report. And recent events have done little to calm nerves: a hack triggered by a rogue OpenAI agent that compromised the infrastructure of AI company Hugging Face added to concerns about how closely leading AI labs are monitoring the testing of their own products.
The China Factor Looms Over the Agenda
Behind the regulatory debate sits a sharpening technological rivalry. Chinese open-weight AI models — systems whose publicly accessible core elements anyone can download and adapt — are becoming increasingly capable compared with the proprietary offerings of American AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Reuters reports that Chinese-made open-weight models are gaining ground with US companies, a trend officials worry could become a security risk if China's leadership decides to interfere.
"It has increased urgency for this administration to make sure that the rest of the world stays within the American tech ecosystem and doesn't seek alternatives," Vivek Chilukuri, a technology and national security fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Reuters.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters about whether China would attend the North Carolina meeting.
Canada's Counterpoint
Not everyone at the table is expected to endorse the hands-off line. Canadian officials are slated to attend, and a spokesperson for the Canadian government said the delegation will advocate for countries to balance innovation with "public trust and safety." That framing is notable given that the US and Canada remain embroiled in a trade war, one started by the US president — a reminder that AI governance is now entangled with broader economic statecraft.
What Comes Next
The North Carolina meeting is the first in a series of gatherings planned in US cities over the coming months, all building toward the G-20 leaders' summit in Miami in December. Whether the US can hold the line against new international AI institutions — while high-profile agent incidents keep safety concerns in the headlines — may define how the AI rules of the road are written for years to come.
For now, the direction of travel is clear. The world's largest economies are being asked to let the industry run — and to trust that competition, not regulation, will keep it safe.
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