At the G7 summit on Wednesday, world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed concerns that the United States could block their countries’ access to top American AI models at any time.
At the lunch, Macron warned G7 leaders and top AI executives, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Donald Trump, that if the U.S. “could flip the switch at some point,” it could not only harm the economies of European customers, but also AI companies themselves.
The comments come days after the Trump administration blocked Anthropic from exporting its latest Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models on national security grounds. The order came after Amazon reported to the White House that it was able to circumvent certain safety guardrails. Cybersecurity experts have argued that the features cited by the government are also present in freely available models, including OpenAI, but Anthropic’s model remains stagnant.
This episode exposed risks that many international companies are grappling with. Any business or government building on U.S. AI infrastructure must now consider the possibility that access could be revoked overnight for reasons that may never be notified.
As reported by the Financial Times, Prime Minister Modi said he was concerned about Trump’s move to block Antropic’s model, adding that democracies should have free access to the best AI models to protect their critical infrastructure.
“The recent restrictions on access to Anthropic’s model confirm what we know at Cohere: that reliance on a small number of tech giants is dangerous to the resilience of companies and democracies,” said Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, a Canadian corporate AI company, in a statement shared with TechCrunch. “Digital sovereignty is not just about market competition or one particular company or country. It is about who controls the underlying technologies that will shape our economic security and national sovereignty for decades to come.”
At the meeting, G7 leaders also discussed the creation of a “Trusted Partner” scheme that would allow countries outside the United States access to advanced AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. The goal is to maintain a kind of open trade network that circumvents U.S. restrictions. Both countries and companies can be trusted partners as long as they use the model to develop robust defenses against competitors like China.
However, it’s unclear how far the Trusted Partner plan will expand. Or whether it’s the answer to startups in Paris or Bangalore whose products were discontinued without warning, it’s not clear.
Nonetheless, Macron noted that it would make sense for Washington to support such a plan and ensure that access to Mythos is granted more broadly. No one would want to buy America’s access to AI if it could disappear overnight.
These comments also come as countries outside Europe and the United States attempt to push for AI sovereignty. This is becoming increasingly difficult to create as the American model continues to lead the way and no one wants to be left out.
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