Europe wary of stoking Anthropic row at G7

“There will be discussions at G7 with tech companies, I will not be prejudging now what will be raised or not in that context,” said Arianna Podestà, the European Commission’s deputy chief spokesperson.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will use the lunch to defend a position Rome has been pushing since it chaired the G7 back in 2024, an Italian diplomat said. That focuses on the “responsibility” for AI and on the definition of truth in artificial intelligence, they said — amid a debate over watermarking AI-generated content, which Meloni also discussed Monday with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Rome.

“It is more and more difficult to make the difference between what is true and what is fake. This is definitely a topic that [Meloni] will raise,” the diplomat said.

One of the few European tech executives set to participate in the meeting, Domyn’s Uljan Sharka, told POLITICO that Europe needs to find common ground with the U.S.

“This narrative of us versus them is completely wrong, and I hope that during the G7 this is going to be addressed,” Sharka said. He added that the transatlantic partnership, as it exists for defense with NATO, “should also work on AI.” 

That didn’t stop him from picking sides in the fight between Anthropic and the White House. “I don’t blame the U.S. administration for doing that,” he said. “They were pushed and forced to take action,” referring to Anthropic’s branding of its models as highly capable of finding software vulnerabilities. 

The U.K. government said it had been in touch with the U.S. government and Anthropic to understand the situation. Following the export control order, the U.K.’s AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said “the main lesson” was that “as we debate the future of national security and technological sovereignty, access to AI capabilities is crucial.”

Clea Caulcutt, Giorgio Leali and Joseph Bambridge contributed to this report.