OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will attend the G7 Leaders Summit in France this month at the personal invitation of President Emmanuel Macron, according to CNBC. It will be the first time Altman has attended the annual summit.
This year's G7 conference, scheduled for June 15–17 in France, is expected to put AI issues front and center. Participating members include the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the E.U.
"The expectation is that he will be engaging in the leaders-level conversation at the G7," OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told CNBC.
Youth safety will be Altman's top concern at the summit, Lehane said, with Lehane framing the moment as one in which "AI has moved from a future-tense debate to a governing reality." A joint agreement on protecting children online had already been reached by G7 digital ministers in late May. Lehane also indicated that OpenAI anticipates the summit will produce a set of voluntary commitments from tech companies.
Beyond youth safety, Lehane cited frontier AI risks — especially in the cyber and biological domains — as another key item on OpenAI's agenda at the conference. The emergence of AI models with sophisticated offensive cyber capabilities, such as Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Cyber, has unsettled businesses and policymakers who fear growing exposure to digital security threats.
Securing Altman's attendance fits into a broader pattern for Macron, who has made a point of personally cultivating relationships with leading figures in the tech industry. That approach yielded results with SoftBank leader Masayoshi Son telling CNBC that Macron reached out directly to request a meeting and pitch him on building data center infrastructure in France, with the two trading text messages as negotiations progressed. SoftBank Group has since announced plans to invest up to €75 billion — roughly $87 billion — in AI data center capacity across France, starting with an initial €45 billion tranche targeting 3.1 GW of capacity by 2031.
Other investment commitments have followed. The Choose France summit also drew pledges from MGX, a UAE-based investment fund, and Bpifrance, France's state-backed investment bank, which together committed €7.5 billion to establish a new AI campus in the country; Salesforce $CRM separately committed €2 billion to French operations, according to CNBC.
OpenAI has also positioned itself as a partner to governments through its "OpenAI for Countries" initiative, which the company said would help nations build data center capacity and deploy ChatGPT to citizens.