Trump and AI CEOs discuss global AI rules

President Trump and top administration officials discussed a U.S.-led effort to coordinate global AI standards Wednesday at a meeting with the CEOs of leading AI companies at the G7 summit in France.

Why it matters: U.S. AI policy decisions increasingly determine who around the world can access the most advanced AI models. Driving the news: Trump, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, participated in a "working lunch" on AI and the digital age with other world leaders. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google's Demis Hassabis and Anthropic's Dario Amodei were among the participants. Meta's Alexandr Wang, Mistral AI's Arthur Mensch, Cohere's Aidan Gomez and Salesforce's Marc Benioff also attended. Following the meeting, OpenAI head of global affairs Chris Lehane said that governments and AI companies discussed creating a global forum for AI standards. "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. The U.S. would lead such a process, Lehane said: "The ability to generate or create standards would be an avenue or pathway helping to ensure ongoing and continued access to the frontier models." Lehane said the group in the room also discussed kids' online safety and ways to ensure AI technology remains available to people around the world. Other companies represented in the room did not immediately respond to requests for comment on what was discussed.

What they're saying: 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," Trump 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." Friction point: The U.S. under the Trump administration has repeatedly called for a hands-off regulatory environment to ensure AI development isn't stymied, but the advancements of recent models have shifted that tone. The recently signed AI executive order involves voluntary safety testing for the biggest AI labs, and the administration slapped export controls on Anthropic's latest AI models.