The chiefs of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies turned up at this year's G7 summit, sitting alongside heads of state to talk through how the technology should be governed — and who should control it.
According to Bloomberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei were among the executives slated to discuss AI risks directly with leaders. CNBC reports that those bosses, along with figures from Google, joined President Trump and other world leaders at the gathering, where frontier AI risks, infrastructure and sovereignty were all on the agenda. One observer told CNBC the executives' presence was "a signal of where power sits."
The meeting exposed a fault line. The Washington Post and ABC News report that European leaders are pushing for checks on American dominance of the industry, and U.S. News & World Report frames the summit as focused on the "contentious future of AI and US dominance." CNBC, in its Daily Open, describes the moment as one where "AI protectionism opens new front for G7" — a sign that the technology is becoming as much a trade and sovereignty issue as a safety one.
China was not at the table. According to CNBC, Beijing pressed its own case as the summit wrapped, including artificial intelligence in a global governance whitepaper published Wednesday and saying it was speeding up cooperation efforts.
Why it matters: when the people building the most powerful AI systems are negotiating rules in the same room as presidents and prime ministers, the decisions made there will shape who controls a technology increasingly tied to national power — and whether smaller players have any say at all.