CHAPEL HILL, N.C.-Tech executives and Trump administration officials urged policymakers from other leading economies to minimize artificial-intelligence regulations, arguing that strict rules could strangle an industry capable of supercharging global growth and curing diseases.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX were among the speakers at a Group of 20 summit focused on innovation and technology, and they cautioned that aggressive regulations could limit the benefits of AI.

Their message was echoed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House AI adviser David Sacks and Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who said the administration's light-touch strategy is boosting the economy.

"Don't regulate hypothetical, theoretical harm. Regulate actual and pragmatic harm," Huang told officials from the G-20 countries, adding that tech advancements such as advanced model training to make models more accurate are making AI safer than regulations proposed by the Biden administration and others.

After Huang's comments, officials from around the world took turns taking photos with the head of the world's largest chip designer, who has become a global superstar because of the ubiquity of Nvidia's products in the AI boom.

"President Trump is committed to ensuring that the United States leads in AI and brings the American AI stack across the world to our G-20 partners," Lutnick said at a press conference.

The talks on the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina followed hacks of other organizations by AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic that underscored the rapid advancements in the sector and mounting security concerns. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) called this week for a global pause in AI development.

Dozens of students and local activists briefly protested outside the event, adding to a wave of pushback against the build-out of data centers powering AI across the country. The county hosting the event recently passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers, one of dozens of localities to do so in recent months due to fears about excessive power and water usage.

"It's misinformation, and by setting a moratorium on data centers, that means the next set of opportunities just won't go to you," Lutnick said, singling out misleading estimates about high water usage from the facilities.

The power of recent AI models has forced the Trump administration to increase oversight of the industry in what it says is the least restrictive way possible and fueled concerns among leaders in other countries that they could be shut out of a transformative technology. The administration has started reviewing the most powerful tools before they are released and briefly shut down two Anthropic models in June due to security concerns.

OpenAI and other companies have added layers of security to prevent safety incidents and are releasing models in phases following the incidents. The White House has stopped short of instituting mandatory regulations, instead calling prerelease testing voluntary.

The U.S. is also trying to attract users to its models and urging countries not to use cheaper models from China, which hopes to get nations hooked on its more cost-effective tools. The U.S. and China are expected to discuss global cooperation on AI during talks later this month that will include discussions between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Kratsios and Lutnick met with Chinese officials, and China signed a set of broad innovation principles alongside other G-20 countries.

Chinese companies have released powerful open-weight models in recent weeks which let users download the numerical parameters that determine their behavior, prompting administration officials to consider restricting access to those tools due to security concerns. Zuckerberg, Huang and other executives have pushed back on such restrictions, arguing that increasing access to all AI tools is the best way to bolster security systems.

"Beyond just what we release ourselves, we're very strong advocates that open source should not be something that people try to restrict or lock down," Zuckerberg told the officials.

The meetings occurred during the same week as G-20 finance minister talks and in the same state. The discussions are part of the run-up to the G-20 leaders summit in Miami later this year.

Musk said that minimal regulation is key to fostering innovation and criticized Europe's regulatory system with European officials in the audience. He said AI could increase the size of the global economy 20% to 30%, an impact that will be felt as more robots powered by AI are used across industries.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Tom Brown, chief compute officer at Anthropic, also spoke at the event. Altman and Demis Hassabis, chief scientist of Google parent Alphabet, were some of the only executives to mention the need for global AI standards and oversight to address cybersecurity risks and other potential harms.

But those threats don't justify stringent regulations that restrict access to the technology, both executives said. "It would be approximately as bad of an idea to say, 'We're not going to have AI in our country' as it was to say, 'We're not going to have electricity in our country' back 100 plus years ago,'" Altman said.