OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will attend the G7 Leaders Summit in France this month at the personal invitation of President Emmanuel Macron, CNBC reported exclusively on June 3 — marking Altman’s first participation in the annual forum of heads of state. The conference is scheduled for June 15-17 in France, with the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the EU as members. “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. Altman’s top priority at the summit will be youth safety, an area where G7 digital ministers already reached a joint framework in late May; OpenAI is also pushing frontier AI risks — particularly in cyber and biological domains — as a key item, with Lehane pointing to the recent rollouts of Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s own GPT-5.5 Cyber as having intensified government and business concerns about digital security exposure. OpenAI expects tech companies to agree on a set of “voluntary commitments” at the summit.
Altman’s G7 invitation reflects Macron’s broader strategy of personally cultivating relationships with global tech leaders to anchor France’s AI ambitions. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son told CNBC separately that Macron reached out directly and the two exchanged text messages as negotiations progressed — an approach that yielded SoftBank’s commitment of up to €75 billion (roughly $87 billion) in French AI data center capacity, beginning with an initial €45 billion tranche. OpenAI has meanwhile been deepening its government-facing activities through its “OpenAI for Countries” initiative, launched in 2025 under former UK Chancellor George Osborne, which offers governments bespoke partnerships to build data center capacity and deploy ChatGPT at scale to citizens. Lehane described the current moment as one in which “AI has moved from a future-tense debate to a governing reality.”