Foreign ministers of the Quad — the United States, India, Japan and Australia — held talks in Atlanta alongside the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting, their third ministerial of the year and the last before a long-delayed leaders’ summit in Manila later this month.
The session took place on 31 October, a day after the G20 ministerial opened, Hiru News reported. It followed Quad ministerials in New Delhi in May and Manila in July.
What was agreed
The headline commitment from Atlanta was the grouping’s willingness to provide more than US$85 million in technical and financial assistance to promote trustworthy artificial intelligence across the Indo-Pacific.
The United States separately pledged US$10 million to India and the wider Asian region to build infrastructure for recycling rare earth minerals from waste — materials essential to semiconductors and electronics, and a sector in which China holds a dominant processing position.
In a joint statement issued after the meeting, the four said they were seriously concerned about “arbitrary export restrictions, as well as non-market policies and practices involving overproduction that disrupt global supply chains in key industries” — language the grouping has used before without naming China.
Hiru notes that co-operating on capacity-building of this kind is a notable development given the Quad’s shared position on economic coercion.
The summit that keeps slipping
Attention now turns to the Quad leaders’ summit scheduled for Manila later in November. The 2025 edition, due in New Delhi, was cancelled, and the grouping has gone without a leaders’ meeting since. It will be the first Quad summit since Donald Trump returned to the US presidency.
Even without a summit, Hiru argues, 2026 has been a substantive year for the grouping: three ministerials allowed the four to settle common priorities, act on decisions already announced and deepen working ties. The Manila meeting is also expected to answer speculation about the Quad’s future, amid commentary that a US–China–Russia triangular arrangement is emerging to divide global spheres of influence.
What is and is not corroborated
Al Jazeera’s reporting independently confirms the setting: the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting was held in Atlanta, Georgia on 30 October, hosted by the United States and opened by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who urged members to co-operate on economic and geopolitical crises. That filing makes no mention of a Quad meeting, and no verified newsroom reachable from this desk carried the Quad session itself. It is therefore reported here on Hiru’s filing alone, and Al Jazeera is not listed as a source.
One independent check is available. The photograph filed with Hiru’s report shows four ministers standing before a “G20 ATLANTA 2026” backdrop flanked by the Australian, Japanese, United States and Indian flags — placing the four Quad governments together at the G20 venue, and confirming that the meeting took place as described. The dollar figures above appear in no other filing this desk could reach and rest on Hiru alone.
