Macron invites Sam Altman to G7 as France courts AI giants

France is hosting the 2026 G7 conference from June 15–17, with AI expected to dominate much of the agenda. Altman was invited by Macron directly to participate in the Leaders Summit.

"The expectation is that he will be engaging in the leaders-level conversation at the G7," Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, told CNBC. 

Lehane named youth safety as Altman's main priority at the summit, noting that G7 digital ministers had already agreed on a joint framework for protecting children online at the end of May.

Beyond youth safety, OpenAI is pushing frontier AI risks, particularly in cyber and biological domains, as a key focus area for the conference. 

Recent releases of advanced AI models with enhanced cyber capabilities, including Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's own GPT-5.5 Cyber, have triggered fresh alarm among businesses and governments about digital security vulnerabilities.

Macron personally pursued SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son ahead of the Japanese conglomerate's pledge to invest 45 billion euros over five years in French AI infrastructure. Son told CNBC the two exchanged direct text messages while working out the details of the deal.

France's annual Choose France business summit has also drawn multi-billion euro commitments from a string of tech players, including a 7.5 billion euro AI campus investment from UAE fund MGX and French public bank Bpifrance and a separate 2 billion euro commitment from Salesforce.

The company launched its "OpenAI for Countries" initiative in 2025, offering governments partnerships to build data centre capacity and deploy ChatGPT to citizens at scale. Former UK Chancellor George Osborne was named to lead the programme in December.