French President Emmanuel Macron urged world democracies to work together to better regulate the use of artificial intelligence systems at a G7 meeting with AI company leaders.
The remark came after the Trump administration issued a directive halting the use of Anthropic’s latest models by foreign nationals. The directive only underlined Europe’s distrust of the US’s usage of tech companies and its dominance around the world. Even before the US administration’s last move, the European Commission presented a new tech sovereignty package to boost local AI companies.
France has also been active on its own, with Macron stating that it will invest in its own AI industry. However, in his remarks, he urged democracies to rally together to prevent authoritarian regimes from accessing AI systems. He also commented that the recent policy moves by the US are good because they recognise the need for regulation, but he also criticised them as a “strictly nationalist” reaction. He said that by closing off access through policy, the US may be damaging the US firms it seeks to protect.
Macron’s position received the backing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who, during the same meeting, said that tech companies should not be the ones regulating AI safety. Altman gave a speech with the G7 leaders and a dozen bosses of AI companies. He urged the need for “an international forum for discussion that establishes globally accepted standards for testing, provides expert and impartial analysis of capabilities and risks, and serves as a venue for cooperation among nations.”
At the meeting were also Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, plus Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, and the heads of smaller AI labs, including France’s Mistral, Germany’s Black Forest Labs, Italy’s Domyn, Japan’s Sakana AI, and the United Kingdom-based Synthesia.
One of them, Aidan Gomez of Canada’s Cohere AI, said that industry leaders and politicians discussed several proposals for AI governance and regulation and told AP that “the consensus was we need something.”
This article used information from The Associated Press.
