France's president just had to ask the CEO he couldn't fire for his country's AI access back.
At the G7 summit today in Evian, Emmanuel Macron held a bilateral meeting with Dario Amodei. One subject on the table: whether European users could get access to Anthropic's models restored after the US government pulled them for the entire world five days ago.
Macron wasn't negotiating from strength. He was lobbying. His best argument was that Europe should be considered a "trusted partner" by the US. Not a right. A request.
At the working lunch, Altman sat between Trump and the Egyptian president. Five American tech CEOs were at the table. Every other country got one seat each.
The joint statement that came out of the summit called on tech firms to develop "safe, secure and age-appropriate" AI. That is the full extent of what seven of the world's largest economies agreed to in writing, after three days.
Macron said publicly that the risk is that AI companies may lose clients if the US can "turn off the switch." He is right. But saying so at a summit where the US blocked every binding commitment doesn't change the underlying math.
Trump's own AI Action Plan published last year was explicit: "We need to establish American AI as the gold standard for AI worldwide and ensure our allies are building on American technology."
That sentence is the strategy. The G7 lunch was the execution. Allies don't get a seat at the table where those decisions are made. They get a working lunch where they can ask nicely.
Jensen Huang said this week that Trump calls him in the middle of the night to talk about national security and winning. That is the actual AI governance meeting. Everything in Evian was the press release.
Shruti (@heyshrutimishra)
Dario asked governments to have an AI kill-switch. Then they used it on him.
Three days after launching their most capable model, the US government sent Anthropic a letter at 5:21pm on a Friday. The order: pull it for every foreign national on earth, including their own non-citizen employees, effective immediately. Anthropic couldn't verify nationality in real time, so they shut it off for everyone.
Today, five days after the shutdown, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis sat down for a working lunch with G7 leaders in Evian, France.
The session title: ensuring the safe and rapid deployment of AI globally.
Here is what is actually happening at that table.
Altman is not there to negotiate. His pitch to every European leader in the room is that Western frontier AI is the safe alternative to Chinese open-source models.
Amodei is there on biosecurity. On June 4, he co-signed a joint letter to Congress alongside Altman and Hassabis asking for mandatory synthetic-DNA screening across the industry. G7 is where you turn a domestic policy letter into a multilateral commitment that becomes the template for legislation in every member country. That is a significant prize, and it has nothing to do with the shutdown.
The communiqué being drafted will be voluntary. The US blocked binding agreements before the summit began. France gets sovereignty language. The US keeps its industrial advantage intact. Everyone shakes hands.
Meanwhile French PM Lecornu told Reuters today: "We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools."
Every country watching this summit is drawing the same conclusion: you don't control AI if you don't control the infrastructure it runs on.
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