CNBC Daily Open: AI protectionism opens new front for G7

Leaders pose ahead of a work meeting as part of the G7 summit, in Evian, eastern France, on June 16, 2026. Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images Hello, this is Leonie Kidd writing to you from London. Welcome to today's edition of the Daily Open newsletter. A new battleground has emerged — access to AI models. This will dominate the G7 leaders' agenda today, as they are joined in Evian-les-Bains by the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and 11 others. Concerns that U.S. protectionism will usher in a new era of control has raised concerns from Brussels to Beijing. What you need to know today G7 leaders spent their first day of meeting in Evian-les-Bains debating the toughest conflicts facing the world today — a resolution to the Iran war and the ongoing aggression in Ukraine . But today, another battleground will take centre stage: access to AI. Leaders in Europe have called on the US to reconsider a directive on AI that suspends certain models for foreign nationals. According to the Financial Times , U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with European officials on the sidelines of the G7 summit to discuss their concerns. AI giant Anthropic was ordered to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models to comply with an export control directive from the U.S. government, citing national security concerns. G7 leaders will be joined by the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and MistralAI, as well as representatives from Meta , Google DeepMind and others. …