AI Moves to the Centre of the G7 Table at Évian
The Business 7 (B7) Summit, the official private-sector engagement group of the G7, concluded in Paris on June 11 under the chairmanship of French employers’ federation MEDEF, bringing together industry associations and executives from all seven member economies, including a Canadian delegation led by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Among the Canadian voices was CPA Canada president and CEO Pamela Steer, who pressed the case for interoperable digital governance and updated accounting frameworks that reflect the weight of the digital economy. The B7’s recommendations to leaders centred on cross-border data flows, fair competition, and regulatory coherence that preserves national flexibility, with Steer arguing that interoperability has become an economic imperative in a fragmented world and pointing to principles-based sustainability standards as the model for digital assets and data governance. Those recommendations now travel southeast to the shore of Lake Geneva, where leaders will decide what to do with them.
When G7 leaders sit down in Évian-les-Bains on June 15-17, artificial intelligence will share top billing with Ukraine and the Middle East. AI has appeared in G7 communiqués since the Hiroshima Process in 2023, but Évian marks the first summit where it functions as a headline geopolitical file rather than a technology annex.
The French presidency has built AI into the architecture of the year. A dedicated Digital Track has run since January, alongside ministerial meetings on finance, trade, foreign affairs, development, interior, and environment held between March and May. The Banque de France has flagged AI’s implications for financial stability as a core Finance Track priority, alongside cybersecurity and quantum technologies. France has also pushed child protection in the age of generative AI through the Digital Track, building on its new law restricting social media access for those under fifteen. And in a signal of how thoroughly industry has been folded into the diplomacy, Emmanuel Macron has invited OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to participate in summit discussions, part of France’s sustained campaign to position itself as Europe’s AI hub.
The Summit Itself
The G7 brings together Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with the European Union participating since 1977. Founded in 1975 after the first oil crisis exposed the need for coordinated economic management among advanced economies, the group has no treaty, no secretariat, and no legal existence. Its power is convening power. The presidency rotates annually, and the host sets the agenda.
Évian has hosted before: the 2003 G8 summit under Jacques Chirac. This year’s gathering will be Macron’s tenth G7 and his second as host, and likely his last before his term ends in 2027. Prime Minister Mark Carney is attending, fresh from hosting Kananaskis last year; he met Macron in Paris this week ahead of the summit. Donald Trump has confirmed his attendance, which was not a given. Invited guests include Brazil, India, Kenya, South Korea, and Syria, with Middle Eastern states joining specific sessions. The leaders’ summit sits atop the ministerial structure rather than replacing it: heads of state and government meet at Évian, while the finance, digital, trade, and foreign affairs ministers have already done their rounds through the spring. Engagement groups including the Business 7, Civil 7, and Think 7 fed recommendations into the process, with the B7 wrapping in Paris on June 11.
One procedural note matters: leaders are expected to skip a joint communiqué in favour of standalone statements on specific topics, a format adopted at Kananaskis to manage American resistance to negotiated consensus language.
The Regulatory Weather Leaders Bring With Them
The AI conversation at Évian will happen against a backdrop of sharply diverging domestic approaches, and the divergence has accelerated in just the past six months.
Canada arrives with Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, tabled June 10. The bill regulates AI chatbot services directly, imposing duties to mitigate harmful content, restricting manipulative engagement techniques, and barring systems from posing as humans or licensed professionals, with penalties reaching $10 million or three percent of global revenue. Australia’s under-16 social media ban, which has struggled in adoption and enforcement since implementation in late 2024, established the template for age-based platform restriction that C-34 now extends. The United Kingdom has gone the other way, shelving its planned comprehensive AI bill in favour of incremental amendments, extending the Online Safety Act to capture AI chatbots through the Crime and Policing Act and proposing regulatory sandboxes under a new Regulating for Growth Bill, while the copyright fight with the creative sector remains unresolved.
The United States arrives having declared regulatory war on the regulators. The December executive order, Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, established a Department of Justice litigation task force to challenge state AI laws in federal court, conditioned broadband funding on states avoiding “onerous” AI legislation, and directed the FTC to treat state-mandated bias mitigation as deceptive trade practice. The administration’s stated objective is American global AI dominance with a minimally burdensome national standard.
That posture transforms the meaning of every interoperability conversation at Évian. When the supplier of the frontier stack treats safety regulation as a barrier to dominance, “alignment on digital governance” among the other six becomes a question of how much regulatory sovereignty they retain while running their economies on American models, American clouds, and American jurisdiction. Canada, Australia, and the UK are legislating at the application layer, the layer they can reach. The model layer sits elsewhere. Whether Évian produces anything that acknowledges that gap, or papers over it with compatibility language, will be the thing to watch when the standalone statements land.
Jen Evans is Principal of Pattern Pulse AI and co-founder of Tech Reset Canada.