The chief executives of the three leading Western artificial-intelligence companies — OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis — attended the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, this week, in what was billed as the first G7 meeting to draw representation from all three at once. They were joined by other technology leaders, including Mistral's Arthur Mensch, for a lunch with world leaders that ran about two hours on Wednesday.
The discussions centred on the opportunities and threats posed by advanced AI, with leaders and executives weighing frontier-model risks, the infrastructure needed to support the technology, and questions of national sovereignty over critical AI systems. Protecting children online was also on the agenda.
The talks unfolded against the backdrop of a fresh US export restriction. Washington this month barred Anthropic from providing access to its latest Mythos and Fable 5 models to foreign individuals and entities, a move that has reignited calls in Europe for 'sovereign AI' — domestically controlled models and compute that are not dependent on US providers or subject to US export controls.
European officials and companies, including Paris-based Mistral, have argued that the restrictions underscore the strategic risk of relying on a handful of American firms, and have pressed for greater investment in home-grown capacity. The presence of the AI chiefs alongside heads of state was described by one analyst as 'a signal of where power sits' in the current technology landscape.
Despite their commercial rivalry, the executives have recently found common ground on policy. Altman, Amodei and Hassabis were among signatories to a letter urging the US Congress to tighten oversight of synthetic DNA and AI-enabled biological threats — a rare show of unity among competitors over the technology's potential dangers.
The summit appearance also comes at a sensitive moment for the industry's finances. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have confidentially filed registration statements with US regulators in recent weeks, setting up what could become two of the largest technology share sales in history and lending added weight to their executives' public posture on governance.
No binding commitments on AI emerged from the lunch, which was framed as a dialogue rather than a negotiation. But the gathering signalled that frontier AI has moved firmly onto the agenda of the world's wealthiest democracies, alongside the summit's headline diplomacy on Iran and Russia.