GoKawiilChiefs 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."