The heads of the world’s leading AI companies will head to the G7 summit in France on Wednesday, a sign of growing political influence as artificial intelligence rises to the top of the global agenda.
CEOs including Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and a dozen other technology leaders, will participate in a lunch meeting at the conference in Evian on Wednesday.
Frontier AI risks, infrastructure and sovereignty are all expected to be discussed at the conference. The protection of children online will also be an important part of the talks, the Élysée Palace, the official residence of the French president in Paris, said at a press conference on Thursday.
Other technology chiefs including France-based Mistral’s Arthur Mensch, Canada’s Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Italian firm Uljan Sharka, UK AI’s Victor Riparbelli of Synthesia and Germany-based Robin Rombach of Black Forest Labs will also be at the luncheon. SalesforceMarc Benioff, MetaAlex Wang, along with the founders of Indian AI company Sarvam and Japan’s Sakana are also expected to attend.
“It just goes to show that in order to make credible commitments to AI, heads of state now need the cooperation, if not the approval, of a handful of private sector executives who are 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 a signal of where power resides.”
‘Inflection point’
The G7 summit – which includes the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the EU – comes as Anthropic remains locked in talks with US officials after Washington placed export controls on the AI lab’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models amid national security concerns.
Recent announcements of powerful AI models with advanced cyber capabilities, including Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber, have brought a wave of concern from businesses and governments about digital security vulnerabilities.
The release of Mythos marked an “inflection point” in AI development, Cameron Kerry, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CNBC, adding that it led the Trump administration to consider regulating the technology.
US export controls on Anthropic models “changed everything,” said Emerson Brooking, executive director of the Atlantic Council.
“Many of the G7 nations have talked about the need for AI investment, but there has always been a perception that this will happen with access to American tech,” he told CNBC. “Now the US has shown that it is willing to cut off the G7 and alliance partners from certain AI capabilities.”
For tech executives, a seat at the table during the G7 represents an important opportunity to influence policy debates at the highest level.
“It seems that firms are waiting to come out with a bunch of voluntary commitments – youth safety, cyber and bio-risk – promises that could become the basis of the whole world,” said Brandt.
Earlier this month, OpenAI told CNBC that it expects a set of “voluntary commitments” to be reached by tech companies during the Summit.
“Border labs want to shape this debate before there are binding laws,” Brookings told CNBC.
