European leaders are meeting on Wednesday with the US president and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just days after Washington suspended access to Anthropic’s latest AI models.
Don’t expect them to confront Donald Trump.
A lunch with the world’s leading artificial intelligence CEOs at the G7 meeting in Evian-les-Bains offers the first opportunity for EU leaders to ensure their voices are heard after the US blocked EU citizens from accessing Anthropic’s cutting-edge tech — a move that triggered renewed calls for Europe to become less reliant on US artificial intelligence.
But there are no signs Europe is on the warpath. Despite the hostile move from Washington, diplomats and officials from nations attending the gathering insist they can work with the US on minimizing AI’s security risks — seeking to turn the episode into a launchpad for collaboration rather than a spat that drives the continents apart.
“We are ready to engage and tackle these security risks together with our like-minded partners,” European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels on Tuesday in advance of the G7 get-together.
“On the topic of frontier models, we should be able to create unity before the end of the G7,” a European diplomat said. “The question is to recreate confidence, we need to recreate a circle of trust.”
Wednesday’s lunch is — on paper at least — not meant to address the threats AI poses to cybersecurity, or the dramatic events of the past days that illuminated inconsistencies in Washington’s approach to the most advanced AI.
During a two-and-a-half-hour lunch, CEOs including Anthropic’s Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and Mistral’s Arthur Mensch will discuss how AI can drive economic growth and how to keep societies resilient, especially for young people, according to the official agenda.
Yet the spat between the Trump administration and Anthropic will be the “elephant in the room,” according to one industry representative, who declined to be identified because they couldn’t comment on preparations for the meeting.
Anthropic confirmed that Amodei would attend the meeting, but declined to comment further on the G7 discussions.
Confirming the company would meet Commission and EU cyber authorities in San Francisco on Thursday, an Anthropic spokesperson said: “The visit is part of our ongoing engagement with the EU, allied democracies and important international institutions on frontier AI’s implications for cybersecurity and opportunities for international collaboration.”
Under the bloc’s AI law, providers of frontier AI models already face strict obligations to test and evaluate their models for a series of risks.
Brussels is navigating the matter cautiously, as there has been no formal communication or notification from the US government regarding export controls — only the statement that Anthropic issued on Friday. In response to the government slapping restrictions on the company’s new models to bar non-US citizens from using them, Anthropic said it had cut off global access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its newest, most tightly controlled models with elite cyber capabilities.
The EU’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, told European Parliament lawmakers on Tuesday that “contingency measures taken in this light should not be discriminatory against partners,” referring to the US order against Anthropic.
But a read-out of a bilateral meeting between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Trump at the G7 on Tuesday didn’t mention the issue.
“There will be discussions at G7 with tech companies, I will not be prejudging now what will be raised or not in that context,” said Arianna Podestà, the European Commission’s deputy chief spokesperson.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will use the lunch to defend a position Rome has been pushing since it chaired the G7 back in 2024, an Italian diplomat said. That focuses on the “responsibility” for AI and on the definition of truth in artificial intelligence, they said — amid a debate over watermarking AI-generated content, which Meloni also discussed Monday with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Rome.
“It is more and more difficult to make the difference between what is true and what is fake. This is definitely a topic that [Meloni] will raise,” the diplomat said.
One of the few European tech executives set to participate in the meeting, Domyn’s Uljan Sharka, told POLITICO that Europe needs to find common ground with the US.
“This narrative of us versus them is completely wrong, and I hope that during the G7 this is going to be addressed,” Sharka said. He added that the transatlantic partnership, as it exists for defense with NATO, “should also work on AI.”
That didn’t stop him from picking sides in the fight between Anthropic and the White House. “I don’t blame the US administration for doing that,” he said. “They were pushed and forced to take action,” referring to Anthropic’s branding of its models as highly capable of finding software vulnerabilities.
The U.K. government said it had been in touch with the US government and Anthropic to understand the situation. Following the export control order, the U.K.’s AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said “the main lesson” was that “as we debate the future of national security and technological sovereignty, access to AI capabilities is crucial.”
Clea Caulcutt, Giorgio Leali and Joseph Bambridge contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on POLITICO and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.
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