OpenAI chief Sam Altman will be attending the G7 conference in France later this month, CNBC has learned, as President Emmanuel Macron steps up efforts to court tech leaders across the globe in support of the country’s AI ambitions.
France is hosting 2026’s G7 conference — an annual meeting of heads of state or government — from June 15-17, with AI expected to feature prominently on the agenda.
Altman was invited by Macron to participate in the Leaders Summit, OpenAI told CNBC exclusively, in what would be the first time he’s attended. “The expectation is that he will be engaging in the leaders-level conversation at the G7,” Chris Lehane, chief global affairs officer at OpenAI, told CNBC.
The G7 conference will feature the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the EU.
Macron has recently been on a charm offensive with tech leaders.
Over the weekend, SoftBank said it planned to invest 45 billion euros ($53 billion) over the next five years to build AI infrastructure in France. This came after Macron personally courted the founder and CEO Masayoshi Son.
The French president requested a meeting with Son and then asked him to build a data center in France, the SoftBank CEO told CNBC on Monday. Son added that the two “exchang[ed] texts” as they hashed out the details of the deal.
OpenAI is expecting a set of “voluntary commitments” to be reached by tech companies during the Summit, Lehane said.
“The main priority for Sam at the G7 is youth safety, but the broader point is that AI has moved from a future-tense debate to a governing reality,” he added. At the end of May, G7 digital ministers agreed on a joint approach to protecting children online.
Other major focus areas for OpenAI at the conference are frontier AI risks, particularly around “cyber and bio,” Lehane said.
Recent announcements of powerful AI models with advanced cyber capabilities, including Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber, have brought a wave of concerns from businesses and governments around digital security weaknesses.
OpenAI has increasingly looked to position itself as a key partner to governments, with the firm launching its “OpenAI for Countries” initiative in 2025.
The company said it would partner with countries to build out data center capacity and deploy ChatGPT to citizens as part of the announcement. Former UK Chancellor George Osborne would lead the program, OpenAI said in December.
Macron has sought to bolster France’s AI infrastructure, with the recent annual business summit Choose France resulting in several billion-dollar investment commitments from tech and data center companies.
As part of that event, it was announced that the United Arab Emirates fund MGX and French public investment bank Bpifrance would invest 7.5 billion euros into a new AI campus in France. Salesforce would also invest 2 billion euros in France.
Google declined to comment on whether leadership execs would be attending the G7, when approached by CNBC. Anthropic told CNBC “nothing” had been confirmed on whether its CEO Dario Amodei was planning on attending. The Élysée Palace, the official residence of the president of France in Paris, has been approached for comment.
