The signs from the room were that the Anthropic saga, rather than dividing nations, could give a new boost to global efforts to keep AI in check, which have been floundering since U.S. President Donald Trump took office for a second time. This optimism played out even as Trump’s administration had yet to announce any truce in its latest confrontation with Anthropic, one of the United States’ top AI developers.
China was mentioned multiple times during the talks, according to detailed notes shared by one participant, reflecting fears that while American companies gained an early lead on artificial intelligence, China is becoming a real competitor in part due to the energy supplies needed to build the most powerful models.
“Everybody knows that it’s really important that G7 countries and its allies band together — that we win in the AI race and .. don’t let autocratic countries take the winning position,” Victor Riparbelli, CEO of U.K.-based Synthesia, told POLITICO after the meeting.
Riparbelli was one of a group of 11 CEOs present that included Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, as well as Arthur Mensch, the CEO of French AI darling Mistral.
Despite very public bust-ups in recent months between Amodei and Trump over Anthropic’s highly capable models, as well as major tensions between companies, French President Emmanuel Macron managed to keep those differences under wraps and walked out of the meeting he hosted with broad consensus to collaborate further.
“We had a great meeting on AI,” Trump said after the lunch, adding the talks between the U.S. administration and Anthropic are “going fine.”