G7 Leaders Sound the Alarm on U.S. AI Export Controls
At the G7 Summit on Wednesday, world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi voiced growing concerns that the United States could cut off their countries’ access to top American AI models at any time.
During a working lunch with top AI executives — including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and President Donald Trump — Macron warned that if the U.S. “from one day to the next can turn off the switch,” the fallout would extend beyond European economies to damage the AI companies themselves.
The remarks come days after the Trump administration blocked Anthropic from exporting its newest models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, citing national security concerns. The order followed Amazon flagging to the White House that certain safety guardrails could be bypassed. Even though cybersecurity experts have argued that the capabilities cited by the government are also present in models that remain freely available — including from OpenAI — Anthropic’s models remain frozen.
This episode has laid bare a risk many international companies are now grappling with: any business or government building on U.S. AI infrastructure must reckon with the possibility that access can be revoked overnight, for reasons they may never be told.
Prime Minister Modi also expressed concern over the Anthropic ban, according to reporting from the Financial Times, noting that democratic nations must have unfettered access to top AI models to protect critical infrastructure.
“The recent restriction on access to Anthropic’s models confirms what we at Cohere have known all along: that companies and democratic nations remaining dependent on a small handful of big tech companies is dangerous to resilience,” said Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Canadian enterprise AI firm Cohere, in a statement shared with TechCrunch. “Digital sovereignty is not just about market competition or any one company or nation. It’s about who controls the foundational technology that will shape our economic security and national sovereignty for decades to come.”
Trusted Partners Scheme Under Discussion
During the meeting, G7 leaders also discussed creating a “trusted partners” scheme that would grant non-U.S. nations access to advanced AI models from firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. The goal is to maintain an open trade network that bypasses U.S. restrictions. Both countries and companies could qualify as trusted partners, provided they use the models to strengthen defenses against rivals like China.
However, it remains unclear how far the trusted partner framework would extend, or whether it offers a solution for a startup in Paris or Bangalore whose product suddenly breaks without warning.
Macron noted that it would make strategic sense for Washington to back such a scheme and ensure broader access to Mythos. As he put it, nobody would want to buy U.S. AI access if it could disappear overnight.
The debate unfolds even as Europe and other non-U.S. countries push for AI sovereignty — an increasingly difficult case to make when American models continue to pull ahead, and no one wants to be left behind.
via TechCrunch AI