At Wednesday’s G7 Summit, world leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed concern that the United States could cut off their countries’ access to top American AI models at any time.
Macron warned G7 leaders and top AI executives (including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and President Donald Trump) over lunch that if the United States “can flip the switch overnight,” it could not only harm the economies of European customers, but also harm AI companies themselves.
The comments come a few days after the Trump administration blocked Anthropic from exporting its newest Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models over national security concerns. The order came after Amazon indicated to the White House that certain security barriers could be bypassed. Although cybersecurity experts have argued that the capabilities cited by the government are also present in models that remain freely available, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic’s models are still frozen.
The episode has exposed a risk that many International companies have been grappling with: Any company or government that relies on US AI infrastructure now has to reckon with the possibility that access could be revoked overnight, for reasons that may never be told to them.
Prime Minister Modi also said he was concerned about Trump’s decision to block Anthropic’s model, according to a report by Financial timesadding that democratic nations must have unlimited access to the best AI models to protect critical infrastructure.
“The recent restriction on access to Anthropic models confirms what we at Cohere have known all along: that companies and democratic nations that remain dependent on a small handful of big tech companies are dangerous to resilience,” Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Canadian artificial intelligence firm Cohere, said in a statement shared with TechCrunch. “Digital sovereignty is not just about competition in the marketplace or about any company or nation. It is about who controls the critical technology that will shape our economic security and national sovereignty for decades to come.”
During the meeting, G7 leaders also discussed the creation of “trusted partners” scheme that would grant non-US countries access to advanced AI models from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI. The goal is to maintain a kind of open trading network that bypasses US restrictions. Both countries and companies could be reliable partners, as long as they used the models to develop stronger defenses against rivals like China.
But it’s unclear how far that trusted partner scheme would extend, or whether it’s an answer for a startup in Paris or Bengaluru whose product just broke without warning.
Still, Macron noted that it would make sense for Washington to back such a plan and ensure that access to Mythos was granted more broadly. No one would want to buy access to American AI if it could disappear overnight.
The comments were made even as Europe and other non-U.S. countries try boost AI sovereignty – an argument that is increasingly difficult to defend when American models continue to advance and no one wants to be left out.
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