OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Join World Leaders at G7 as AI Rises on the Geopolitical Agenda

Chiefs of the world's leading frontier AI companies gathered alongside heads of state at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France on Wednesday, underscoring how deeply artificial intelligence has embedded itself into the highest levels of global policymaking.

CEOs including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis took part in a working lunch with G7 leaders and outreach partners focused on innovation and AI. Around a dozen other tech executives were also present.

The G7 groups the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the European Union. Frontier AI risks, infrastructure, and sovereignty were all on the agenda, along with the protection of children online, according to a press briefing from the Élysée Palace.

Other attendees included Mistral's Arthur Mensch, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, Domyn's Uljan Sharka, Synthesia's Victor Riparbelli, Black Forest Labs' Robin Rombach, Salesforce's Marc Benioff, and Meta's Alex Wang. Founders of Indian AI company Sarvam and Japan's Sakana were also expected to participate.

"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, told CNBC. "We're seeing a shift in who gets a seat at the table and a signal of where power sits."

The summit arrives at a particularly fraught moment for U.S.-allied AI policy. Anthropic remains in active negotiations with the Trump administration after Washington imposed export controls on the lab's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, citing national security concerns.

Cameron Kerry, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, described the release of Anthropic's Mythos model as an "inflection point" in AI development, telling CNBC it prompted the Trump administration to consider regulating the technology more formally.

The export controls have rattled longstanding assumptions among allied nations. "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," Emerson Brooking, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told CNBC. "Now the U.S. has indicated a willingness to cut off the G7 and even treaty allies from certain AI capabilities."

Recent releases of AI models with advanced cyber capabilities — including Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Cyber — have amplified concerns among businesses and governments about digital security vulnerabilities.

For the companies present, the summit represents a direct channel to shape the policy environment before binding regulations take hold. OpenAI said earlier this month it expected a set of "voluntary commitments" to be reached by tech firms during the summit.

"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," Brandt said. "The frontier labs want to shape this debate before any binding rules exist," Brooking added.

Whether those voluntary pledges satisfy governments seeking harder guardrails — particularly as export control disputes strain U.S. relationships with longtime allies — will determine whether this week's summit amounts to a durable policy moment or a well-photographed lunch.

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