At G7 AI Lunch, Altman Sits at Trump's Right While Amodei Gets Cold Shoulder

According to Beating, at the G7 AI working lunch in Evian on June 18, the seating arrangement starkly reflected U.S. AI dominance and political standing. U.S. companies held 5 of 12 tech sector seats—OpenAI's Altman, Anthropic's Amodei, DeepMind's Hassabis, Scale AI's Alexandr Wang, and Salesforce's Benioff—while other nations (UK, France, Germany, Japan, India, Canada) received only one representative each.

Seat positioning signaled deeper geopolitical messaging: Altman sat to Trump's right, Hassabis to his left, while Amodei—whose company faces U.S. model export restrictions—was placed across from Trump, next to French President Macron. Observers saw Altman appearing pleased while Amodei appeared visibly tense, interpreting the seating as reflecting Washington's assessment of each company's political alignment.