World leaders fear US can 'switch off' access to top AI models

At the G7 Summit on Wednesday, world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi voiced concerns that the United States 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, that if the US “from one day to the next can turn off the switch,” it could harm the economies of European customers and damage the AI firms themselves.

The comments came days after the Trump administration blocked Anthropic from exporting its newest Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models on national security grounds. The order followed Amazon flagging to the White House that certain safety guardrails could be bypassed. Cybersecurity experts argue that similar capabilities are also present in models that remain freely available, including from OpenAI, yet Anthropic's models remain frozen.

The episode has exposed a risk many international companies face: any company or government building on US AI infrastructure must now reckon with the possibility that access can be revoked overnight for reasons they may never be told. Prime Minister Modi, citing a Financial Times report, said he was concerned about Trump's move, 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. “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 discussed creating a “trusted partners” scheme that would grant non-US nations access to advanced AI models from firms like Anthropic and OpenAI, maintaining an open trade network that bypasses US restrictions. Both countries and companies could become trusted partners if they use the models to build stronger defenses against rivals like China. However, it is unclear how far the scheme would extend or whether it would help a startup in Paris or Bangalore whose product suddenly breaks without warning. Macron noted that it would make sense for Washington to back such a scheme and ensure broader access to Mythos models. Nobody would want to buy US AI access if it could disappear overnight.