President Trump met Wednesday at the G7 summit in France with chief executives of leading AI companies for a working lunch to discuss a U.S.-led effort to coordinate global AI standards.
Trump, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, participated in the working lunch, which included OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google's Demis Hassabis, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Meta's Alexandr Wang, Mistral AI's Arthur Mensch, Cohere's Aidan Gomez and Salesforce's Marc Benioff.
OpenAI head of global affairs Chris Lehane said, "There really is a coalescing" among countries and AI labs around the idea of establishing "a forum or a space for the different democratic countries to be able to work together to ultimately see if there's a way to establish some type of AI safety standards," Lehane told reporters.
Lehane said the U.S. would lead such a process: "The ability to generate or create standards would be an avenue or pathway helping to ensure ongoing and continued access to the frontier models." He said the group also discussed kids' online safety and ways to ensure AI technology remains available to people around the world.
Trump said at a press conference afterward that he had an "excellent" meeting on AI. "What's going on with that? It's going to be the biggest thing ever," he said. "We have to be very careful with it. It's both great and could be bad. We have to be careful with it, but we're leading China. We're leading the world on that."
At the same press conference, he cautioned that the preliminary deal with Iran isn't yet final and said the U.S. could "resume strikes" if needed, and he suggested the U.S. inflicted up to $2 trillion in damage on Iran.