World leaders want American AI. They just don’t want America to be able to turn it off

Published 17 June 2026 · politics

At the G7 Summit on Wednesday, World leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi voiced concerns that the U.S. could

At the G7 Summit on Wednesday, World leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi voiced concerns that the U.S. could cut off their countries’ access to top American AI models at any time. Macron warned G7 leaders and top AI executives — including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and President Donald Trump — over lunch that if the U.S. “from one day to the next can turn off the switch,” it could not only harm the economies of European customers but also damage the AI firms themselves. The comments come a few days after the Trump administration blocked Anthropic from exporting its newest Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models on national security grounds. The order came after Amazon flagged 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 are still on ice. The episode has exposed a risk that many international companies have been grappling with: any company or government that builds on U.S. AI infrastructure now has to reckon with the possibility that access can be revoked overnight, for reasons they may never be told. Prime Minister Modi also said he was concerned about Trump’s move to block Anthropic’s model, according to reporting from Financial Times, adding 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,” Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Canadian enterprise AI firm Cohere, said 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.” During the meeting, G7 leaders also discussed the creation of a “trusted partners” scheme that would grant access for non-U.S. nations to advanced AI models from firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. The goal is to maintain a sort of open trade network that bypasses U.S. restrictions. Both countries and companies could be trusted partners, as long as they used the models to develop stronger defenses against rivals like China. But it’s not clear how far that trusted partner scheme would extend, or whether it’s an answer for a startup in Paris or Bangalore that just had its product break without warning.