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G7 Ministerial Declaration on Digital & Technology
Paris, May 29, 2026
[pdf]
We, the G7 Digital and Technology Ministers, met on May 29 in Paris, under France’s presidency. We stress that digital technologies are a driver of innovation and prosperity in our societies and economies, with profound impact on our lives, particularly affecting the youngest among us. We committed to a comprehensive and responsible approach that embraces all digital technologies so as to address the cross-cutting challenges faced by both users and providers, to bolster productivity growth, strengthen national competitiveness, and improve quality of life.
Building on the achievements of previous G7 presidencies, we focused on strengthening the digital economy by reaffirming our commitment to an open, innovation-friendly approach to digital environments, with particular emphasis on supporting AI openness and fostering AI adoption by micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (priority 2) while ensuring that AI is secure (priority 1). With the rapid emergence and use of new technologies and use cases, we are committed to ensuring the resilience and resource efficiency of the digital sector (priority 3)., as well as fostering a safer and more secure digital space for minors online (priority 4).
In doing so and considering that data plays a pivotal role in fostering digital innovation, we reiterate the importance of maintaining trust-based data frameworks based on our commitment to Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT), respecting applicable legislation on privacy, data protection, intellectual property rights, including trade secrets, and security, while preserving governments’ ability to address legitimate public policy objectives.
This work builds on the efforts of previous presidencies and other G7 tracks of the French Presidency, including the Health and Social-Employment working groups. We also acknowledge the work of the G7 Cyber Working Group, which is looking this year at AI, post-quantum cryptography, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and telecoms, whose outputs informed the Digital and Technology Track’s discussions on AI. Building on ongoing discussions among G7 competition authorities, we welcome the G7 Digital Competition Summit, which will examine competition in AI inputs, e.g., computing power, data, energy, and talent. Moreover, we welcome the continuation of the work of the point of contact groups on semiconductors and digital standards, and the working group on quantum technologies.
The rapid advancement and large-scale deployment of AI across critical domains can bring transformative opportunities, such as productivity gains, improvements to public services, and advances in, notably, science and healthcare. We recognize that AI systems and models may introduce and be subject to certain risks arising from, for example, design flaws or cybersecurity vulnerabilities. We recognize that they may be misused by malicious actors, including in the areas of malicious cyber activities and the development of chemical, biological, and radiological capabilities. Taking a pro-innovation approach to addressing these risks, ensuring governments are equipped with an understanding of advanced AI, and leveraging technologies to build resilience are essential to sustaining trust in AI systems and models, and encouraging responsible approaches to development, design and broad adoption. We acknowledge the Hiroshima AI Process (HAIP) initiated during Japan's 2023 G7 Presidency, the related Reporting Framework advanced by Italy’s 2024 and Canada’s 2025 G7 presidencies, and note G7 engagements have strengthened our collective commitment to human-centric adoption of secure, responsible and trustworthy AI. This is reflected in significantly broader private sector engagement in the Hiroshima AI Process Reporting Framework, with the support of the OECD through the Global Partnership on AI. We commend the revised Hiroshima AI Process Reporting Framework and recognize it as a key multi-stakeholder platform to advance coherence across AI risk assessment, reporting and mitigation assessment approaches, as well as international efforts to further disseminate it and broaden participation. Additionally, we welcome the initiatives of the Hiroshima AI Process Friends Group and the Partners’ Community, the further expansion of its membership from developing countries, and the related Action Plan announced in March 2026.
Moreover, we will initiate discussions under France’s G7 presidency bringing together various stakeholders and including members of the International Network for Advanced AI Measurement, Evaluation and Science, and the OECD, with a view to improving mutual understanding and comparability of AI risk assessment frameworks, promoting innovation and driving adoption of AI.
We affirm that the secure, responsible and trustworthy AI with human-centric approach serves as a foundation for accelerating innovation, trust, and adoption. AI has transformative potential for our societies, as shown by initiatives like the Coordination Group of Leading Cancer Organizations’ work on the promising role of AI in early detection and cancer prevention, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s EASTER Project in the field of disease detection targeting especially low- and middle-income countries. We will continue to align our efforts through initiatives such as the AI HUB for Sustainable Development, launched during Italy’s G7 Presidency, which is deepening partnerships with Africa to accelerate AI adoption, expand computing and infrastructure, and support startup growth. We also recognize that governments have a role to play in accelerating AI adoption across agencies, through AI procurement guidelines which could also be referred to by private sector entities, in order to achieve strong public sector transparency, fair procurement and government accountability practices. As the volume of AI-generated content circulating online continues to grow, the ability to reliably detect and identify such content has become important, including for improving transparency in the provenance of information sources and preventing their use to deceive and defraud. In response, we plan to continue discussions between relevant national experts on the sharing of technical advances and best practices on synthetic content detection. Such discussions may also contribute to enhance the French Presidency’s Meta-detector for AI-generated content, an open source tool that aggregates multiple synthetic content detectors, enabling cross-referenced assessments.
AI is an essential pillar for our economies, enhancing productivity, competitiveness, and scientific progress. Support for AI adoption spurs economic growth, including among micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), and helps ensure a market for innovative AI companies that offer these solutions. However, its adoption and accessibility remain highly uneven across and within our economies. AI openness has been a cornerstone of technological leadership and innovation, contributing to the broader diffusion of AI, fostering international research collaborations, and accelerating the translation of discoveries into real-world applications. Greater clarity can be useful in the field of AI openness, including by clearly distinguishing between different degrees of openness, and in the management of possible risks, as ambiguity in this area can undermine trust and weaken AI adoption. As recognized across G7 economies, MSMEs face numerous distinct challenges and their needs differ significantly depending on the region, sector, size, and digital maturity. This diversity implies that AI adoption pathways vary and justifies targeted and proportionate policy responses to lower barriers to adoption, including improving expertise and understanding. It is also important to support the sharing of use cases and best practices of AI adoption to enable MSMEs to better assess their AI maturity in a simple, comparable and actionable way.
Building on the work of Italy’s and Canada’s G7 presidencies, we have focused our efforts on providing concrete and actionable deliverables aiming at leveraging AI for economic growth. This includes a twofold effort on AI openness and MSMEs digital readiness. Clear and widely recognized principles and typology of AI openness supports the broad access to and utilization of open-source solutions. Our Vision on AI openness opportunities and shared language aims to provide greater clarity in the use of terminology describing AI openness. We expect this Vision to help extend the existing benefits of AI openness in science, innovation, and economic growth, as highlighted in the OECD G7 Discussion paper on The Benefits of AI Openness, while ensuring trust in technologies and access to a greater diversity of models. We welcome the valuable contribution of the Open Source Initiative, as well as other members of the community, in supporting the development of this document.
We recognize the potential AI has for MSMEs in terms of productivity and growth and underline the need to further enable national ecosystems in fostering AI adoption, AI literacy and skills development, and to prepare workers for the transformation of certain professions with AI. In this regard, our efforts have focused on the joint development with the OECD, in close collaboration with the G7 Social-Employment working group, of a G7 SME AI Readiness Tool that will help MSMEs better understand and assess their knowledge, digital and AI readiness. This useful tool will be made available to all companies on the G7 AI Training Hub, created by the G7 Social-Employment working group. We built on our domestic initiatives and on the outcomes of previous presidencies – particularly on the takeaways of the G7 report on driving factors and challenges of AI adoption and development among MSMEs, including on the OECD taxonomy for SME AI adoption and the G7 SME AI Adoption Blueprint – to lower barriers and promote an enabling environment for adoption. Ultimately, we intend to help MSMEs and their workforce take the leap into AI.
As the development and use of digital technologies can lead to economic opportunities, we also recognize that they consume an increasing amount of natural resources and energy and that these resources often span a highly distributed value and supply chain, a trend only growing as new technologies and uses continue to scale. Recognizing the need for reliable and diversified energy generation and efficient resource use, we acknowledge that shortcomings in either can create negative externalities, weaken the resilience of digital technologies to external shocks, natural disasters and resources scarcity, slow down the scaling of the digital and AI value chain and impact prices of natural resources, preventing the full realization of economic opportunities. By optimizing and improving energy systems, digitalization and AI can drive efficiency gains and support a more efficient use of natural resources in certain use cases. Increasing access to secure, reliable, durable, and affordable energy supply, and the efficiency of resource and energy utilization by the digital value chain, therefore becomes key to the resilience capacity of economies, as well as to the ability to develop digital infrastructure and AI models. In this regard, we underline the key role of resilient and reliable energy capacity and infrastructure, resilient energy and natural resource management, and grid modernization to accelerate our efforts in these areas.
Building on the G7 Energy and AI Work Plan and reaffirming the need to ensure the resilience and resource efficiency of the digital and AI sector, we note the French Presidency’s efforts on an International Overview of practices contributing to support the resilience and resource efficiency within the digital sector.
We reaffirm the potential of artificial intelligence to grow prosperity, benefit societies and address pressing global challenges and are thus committed to powering AI now and in the future. We recognize that increased adoption of AI will place growing pressure on our energy grids, at current energy production levels, and have implications for the resilience of the sector itself. However, continued innovation is expected to promote the reliability and resilience] of energy systems and infrastructure over time, and AI-enabled benefits underscore the importance of investing in secure, reliable, durable, and affordable] energy systems. We will strive to identify and support the scaling of solutions that mitigate negative externalities, generate benefits for people and preserve our natural resources. We acknowledge the importance of strong awareness of the energy sector and of strengthening the voluntary sharing of knowledge and best practices, including in the field of research, measurement and use cases, to support the development and deployment of innovative practices that improve the energy and resource efficiency of AI models and hardware. This sharing of knowledge and best practices aims to inform policymakers, in close collaboration with scientific communities and the private sector. As part of this initial effort, we note the efforts made by the French Presidency on the Policy Paper on Agentic AI: deployment, adoption and impacts, led by Inria – France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology –, on the overview of voluntary industry-led, academic, or multistakeholder initiatives on measurement, monitoring and reporting of the energy and resource requirements of AI models, as requested under the G7 AI and Energy work plan, as well as OECD’s ongoing work on the Strategic Role of Public Procurement in Public Sector AI Deployment.
In order to safeguard minors’ physical, mental, and cognitive well-being and development, we support a Common G7 Set of Principles that defines a safe and secure digital space for minors so as to guide our ongoing responses to protect minors against a wide range of risks, digital services commitment to online safety, and our mutual goals to safeguard safety, privacy, freedom of expression online, human rights and fundamental freedoms. These principles will contribute to empowering parents, families, guardians, healthcare professionals and teachers, so that minors can benefit fully from new technologies and safe online experiences.
Digital services can be a powerful tool to learn, discover and exchange. Besides, digital literacy and AI education for minors, guardians, and teachers can contribute to help minors to engage confidently in the digital world and benefit from it. Still, concerns have been raised regarding risks, including from the scientific community, for minors of excessive screen time and the use of certain digital services that incorporate attention and engagement maximizing features, threaten their physical and mental health, as well as their privacy, security, well-being, and cognitive and social development. These can lead to compulsive, habit-forming, and other problematic uses and behaviors, which may impact self-esteem and further threaten their health. In this regard, we note the importance for digital services providers and governments of taking action to protect minors, such as via risk-mitigation measures and by equipping parents and guardians with tools to shape minors’ uses of the digital space.
Without shared efforts and comprehensive approaches to foster online safety by digital services providers, governments and guardians, minors can also be exposed to illegal and age-inappropriate content and interactions across digital services, damaging their mental health and well-being. This notably includes exposure to online harassment, grooming, self-harm, recruitment by organized criminal groups, criminal activities, unwanted or illicit sexual solicitations, and to child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), and criminal activity relating to non-consensual intimate imagery (NCIIs). Some of these harms, including NCIIs and sexualized content, may disproportionately affect girls and young women, others may affect boys and young men.
New technologies such as generative AI, notably chatbots, while bearing benefits, can replicate or exacerbate existing risks for minors while taking new forms. Particular concern exists regarding non-consensual intimate imagery, AI-generated child sexual abuse material, sexually exploitative or pornographic content, and deceptive, violent, or coercive interactions and content – such as deepfakes and manipulative simulated interactions. Such risks, which undermine minors’ well-being and safety, reinforce the need for minors to be able to distinguish synthetic content, to identify content provenance, and to build their critical digital skills to engage responsibly in digital spaces. As these technologies continue to evolve and proliferate, people need support to develop digital literacy to ensure they can engage critically and responsibly in digital spaces. Principles are also needed to guide governmental response to better protect minors in vulnerable situations against aforementioned risks and to strengthen continued collaboration among stakeholders.
In order to strengthen scientific knowledge and evaluation of digital services used by minors, the French Presidency will initiate discussions on building a scientific initiative gathering relevant stakeholders.
As part of France's G7 presidency, we, the Digital and Technology Ministers, welcome the progress made in harnessing digital technologies for innovation, growth and opportunities.
We wish to thank all G7 members for their contributions to the success of the G7 Digital & Technology track, as well as partner countries who have shared valuable insights. We would like to extend our appreciation to the knowledge partners that have worked with G7 members, notably the OECD and the Open Source Initiative. We also recognize the valuable contributions of the engagement groups, including the Business 7, Tech 7, Youth 7, Labour 7, and Think Tank 7, among others.
Looking ahead, we welcome the US presidency of the G7 in 2027 and look forward to our continued cooperation.
Source: Ministère de l'Économie, des Finances et de la Souveraineté industrielle, énergétique et numérique
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