AI in spotlight at G7 as Trump, world leaders joined by tech chiefs

Chiefs of the world’s leading AI companies are descending on the G7 conference in France Wednesday, in a sign of their growing geopolitical influence as artificial intelligence rises to the top of the global agenda.

CEOs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, alongside around a dozen other tech leaders, will take part in a lunch meeting at the summit 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 a key part of the discussions, The Élysée Palace, the official residence of the president of France in Paris, said in a press briefing on Thursday.

Other tech chiefs including France-based Mistral’s Arthur Mensch, Canada’s Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Italian company Domyn’s Uljan Sharka, U.K. AI scaleup Synthesia’s Victor Riparbelli and German-based Black Forest Labs’ Robin Rombach will also be present at the lunch. Salesforce‘s Marc Benioff, Meta‘s Alex Wang, alongside the founders of Indian AI company Sarvam and Japan’s Sakana are also pegged to attend.

“It just shows that in order to make credible commitments on AI, heads of state now need the cooperation, if not endorsement, of a handful of private sector executives actually building 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 sits.”

The G7 summit — which features the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the EU — comes as Anthropic remains locked in negotiations with the U.S. administration after Washington imposed 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 concerns from businesses and governments around digital security weaknesses.

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.

U.S. export controls on Anthropic’s models have “changed everything,” said Emerson Brooking, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“Multiple G7 nations have previously alluded to the need for sovereign AI investment, but there was always an assumption that this would take place alongside access to the U.S. tech stack,” he told CNBC. “Now the U.S. has indicated a willingness to cut off the G7 and even treaty allies from certain AI capabilities.”

For tech bosses, a seat at the table during the G7 represents a key opportunity to influence policy debates at the highest level.

“It seems the firms expect to come away with a package of voluntary commitments — youth safety, frontier risk in cyber and bio — pledges that are likely to become the de facto global baseline,” said Brandt.

Earlier this month, OpenAI told CNBC it was expecting a set of “voluntary commitments” to be reached by tech companies during the Summit.

“The frontier labs want to shape this debate before any binding rules exist,” Brookings told CNBC.