AI in spotlight at G7 as Trump, world leaders joined by tech chiefs
The heads of the world’s leading AI companies are attending the G7 conference in France on Wednesday, in a sign of their increasing geopolitical influence as AI rises to the top of the global agenda.
CEOs and nearly a dozen tech leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, will attend a lunch meeting at the Evian summit on Wednesday.
The conference is expected to discuss border AI risks, infrastructure and sovereignty. The Élysée Palace, the official residence of the French president in Paris, said at a news conference on Thursday that protecting children online will also be an important part of the discussions.
Other tech chiefs will also be present at the luncheon, including Arthur Mensch of France-based Mistral, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez from Canada, Uljan Sharka of Italy’s Domyn, Victor Riparbelli of AI scaling Synthesia from the UK and Robin Rombach of Germany-based Black Forest Labs. sales forceMarc Benioff, Meta‘s Alex Wang, as well as the founders of Indian AI company Sarvam and Japan’s Sakana, are also expected to attend.
“This suggests that to make credible commitments on AI, heads of state now need the cooperation, if not the approval, of a handful of private sector executives developing the technology,” Jessica Brandt, senior fellow for technology and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told CNBC.
“We’re seeing a shift in who gets a seat at the table, and we’re seeing a sign of where the power lies.”
‘Turning point’
The G7 summit, which includes the USA, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the EU, comes with an anthropic attitude Negotiations with the US administration have been deadlocked after Washington imposed export controls on the AI lab’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models due to national security concerns.
The recent announcement of powerful AI models with advanced cyber capabilities, including Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber, has raised a number of concerns in businesses and governments about digital security weaknesses.
Cameron Kerry, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CNBC that the launch of Mythos was a “milestone” in AI development, adding that it had led the Trump administration to consider regulating the technology.
Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said U.S. export controls on Anthropic’s models “changed everything.”
“Many G7 countries have previously talked about the need for independent AI investment, but there was always an assumption that this would happen alongside access to the US tech stack,” he told CNBC. “Now the United States has demonstrated a willingness to deprive the G7 and even its treaty allies of certain AI capabilities.”
For tech bosses, having a seat at the table during the G7 represents a key opportunity to influence policy debates at the highest level.
“Companies appear to be waiting to emerge with a package of voluntary commitments, such as youth safety, border risks in cyber and bio, that will likely become the de facto global baseline,” Brandt said.
Earlier this month, OpenAI told CNBC that it expects tech companies to reach a series of “voluntary commitments” during the Summit.
“Frontier labs want to shape this debate before any binding rules emerge,” Brookings told CNBC.
