Policy Report for the G7 distributed on the occasion of the Aspen International Conference “Our digital future: geoeconomics and security in the AI era”

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a major technological innovation which has already started to impact the business world and the economies of major countries. Looking forward, AI-related applications could exert even more profound effects as their capabilities increase and they become a more central tenet of our daily life. Throughout human history, technology has represented an extremely powerful instrument of wealth creation, liberation and empowerment. However, technological leaps are often disruptive and produce real shocks, which can in turn generate asymmetric effects among countries and in some cases conflicts. For this reason, dialogue, coordination and cooperation may be welcomed or even necessary. However, reaching such dialogue, coordination and cooperation will not be easy, both within the G7 and between G7 members and other counterparts. The working group set up by Aspen Institute Italia in February 2024 looked at the development of AI in the G7 context from various perspectives: economic, political, as well as in the security and defense fields.