Washington opened a two-day ministerial meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Tuesday by urging the world’s largest economies to slow down on drafting new AI rules or creating new bodies to police the technology, as governments try to balance innovation, safety, and national competitiveness.

The conclusions reached in this G20 cycle are expected to feed into the leaders’ summit in Miami this December, giving the discussions added weight beyond the ministerial level.

The Carolina Principles proposal

The US framework is being referred to locally as the Carolina Principles. Michael Kratsios, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, co-hosted the meeting with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and presented the proposal to the assembled officials.

Reuters reported that signatory countries would commit to “reserve new regulation for novel considerations” when drafting AI rules, direct funding toward foundational research, and expand commercial opportunities for new technology.

Kratsios said restraint was the sensible approach. “Policymakers do not need to approach each innovation in isolation and should not treat every emerging technology as a first-of-a-kind policy problem,” he told the group, according to Reuters. A White House official also said member countries should avoid creating any new organization to oversee AI development.

Guest list at the G20 summit

Ministers from Japan, Germany, France, India and South Korea attended the summit. Major industry executives also took part. Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, joined Tuesday’s session by video and used the appearance to criticize the European Union’s technology rules, saying the bloc’s policy “inhibits progress” and urging leaders outside China to develop new energy supplies for data centers.

Meta’s participation is expected to come through CEO Mark Zuckerberg on video chat, replacing company president Dina Powell McCormick, who had previously been slated to speak. Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis was added late to the video lineup, according to a Google spokesperson. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are both scheduled to attend in person on Wednesday for sit-down talks with Lutnick.

Chapel Hill, home to the University of North Carolina, is one stop on a series of ministerial meetings taking place in US cities ahead of December’s leaders’ summit in Miami.

The proposal’s timing and broader backdrop

No federal AI law has cleared the US Congress, and US states that have tried to fill the gap have faced pressure from the White House. Europe, by contrast, is moving ahead with the kind of framework Washington is resisting. The EU’s AI Act is already in force, and the Digital Services Act is being enforced against ChatGPT and other named platforms.

The Cyber Resilience Act also took effect this month, although Brussels has delayed some compliance deadlines and softened parts of its data-protection regime.

A United Nations panel has warned that AI is advancing faster than scientists understand it or governments can respond. The summit also comes after OpenAI disclosed a testing incident in which autonomous AI agents reached the open internet and compromised systems at Hugging Face, a repository for AI software. OpenAI report on test model hacked Hugging Face

Washington could still face resistance

Canada has indicated it will take the opposite view, telling reporters that its delegation will push to weigh AI progress against “public trust and safety,” even as it remains locked in an active trade conflict with the United States. China’s embassy in Washington has not said whether it will attend, Reuters reported.

At a broader level, the talks reflect a contest for AI supremacy. Chinese open-weight models, whose core components are publicly available, are closing the gap on proprietary US systems from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Vivek Chilukuri, a technology and national-security fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Reuters that the trend 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.”

Because the G20 operates by consensus, a communiqué that does not address AI governance and regulation would already be a win for the US position.

Reuters report on US urging hands-off AI regulation at G20