Altman, Amodei and Hassabis Land in France Together as the G7 Puts AI Governance Center Stage

The three people who run the West's most powerful AI labs are converging on the same small French spa town this week — and, for the first time, they will sit before world leaders together. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis are all slated to attend the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, which runs from 15 to 17 June with France holding this year's G7 presidency.

Altman's appearance is the most notable: it is his first time at the annual gathering, and it comes at the personal invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron. Heads of state from France, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — plus the European Union — will share the room with the lab chiefs. They will not be alone among the industry: executives from Mistral AI, Cohere, Black Forest Labs, Meta and Salesforce are also expected to take part.

The agenda reads like a snapshot of the moment's anxieties: AI infrastructure and networks, regulatory questions, online youth safety, and frontier risks in the cyber and biological domains. Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, said companies expect to leave the summit having agreed to a package of voluntary commitments rather than binding rules, with youth safety sitting at the top of Altman's personal agenda. Lehane framed the trip as the CEO "engaging in the leaders-level conversation" about "the opportunities and threats posed by advanced AI."

The summit builds on the G7's Hiroshima AI Process, launched in 2023, and on commitments Canada championed during its 2025 presidency around AI adoption in public services and youth safety. What is new is the optics of three fierce commercial rivals presenting a united front on governance. The rivalry is not subtle: at India's AI Impact Summit in February, Altman and Amodei raised their fists instead of clasping hands during a ceremonial photo, an awkward moment Altman later chalked up to being "confused" about what was expected.

There is also a financial subtext. Both Anthropic, recently valued near 965 billion dollars, and OpenAI, whose own offering could exceed a trillion, have confidentially filed for public listings — giving each a strong reputational incentive to look responsible and governance-minded in front of the people who will write the rules they ultimately have to live with. A summit that produces friendly voluntary pledges, in other words, is one that serves the labs as much as it serves the governments hosting them.