Black Forest Labs CEO presses G7 on open AI
Black Forest Labs CEO Robin Rombach told G7 leaders that open-weight AI models are vital economic infrastructure, arguing that suppressing them would leave the world dependent on a handful of firms.
Robin Rombach, co-founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs, made the case for open AI development to G7 leaders, including President Macron, President Trump, Chancellor Merz and European Commission President von der Leyen, according to a speech the company published on its blog.
Rombach described Black Forest Labs as a 90-person frontier lab with operations in Germany and the United States that builds visual "world models." He said its team co-developed three of the five most popular open generative AI models of all time, including Stable Diffusion. He told the leaders that visual models, alongside language models, will soon be "critical economic infrastructure." He added that releasing them openly lets businesses build their own systems "rather than renting them from a handful of companies."
He also acknowledged that open image, video and audio models can be misused or modified to produce unlawful content and are hard to withdraw once released. He said the company's latest open models showed "over 10 times fewer vulnerabilities for sexual deepfakes and child abuse material" than open models from other Big Tech firms. The post does not explain how that was measured or which models were compared.
Rombach said governments have a role through safety tools, evaluation standards and "targeted regulation." He welcomed US, EU and UK efforts against sexual deepfakes, but warned that "a climate of fear around open technology" would concentrate critical infrastructure in a few firms.
The post does not say whether the G7 made any commitments in response.