At the G7, Black Forest Labs advocates for open and responsible AI

Black Forest Labs CEO Robin Rombach urged G7 leaders to support open FLUX and Stable Diffusion visual models to ensure strategic and economic independence.

At the G7, Robin Rombach, co-founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs, the laboratory behind Stable Diffusion and FLUX models, spoke before several leaders, including Donald Trump, Ursula von der Leyen, and Emmanuel Macron, to advocate for open innovation in AI. He described his company as a small, cutting-edge lab, ninety people split between Germany and the United States, specializing in world models—these visual models that simulate the physical world.

His argument: language is only a limited representation of reality, and visual models will soon become, in his view, an economic infrastructure as critical as language models. Sharing technology openly, he argues, allows companies to build their own systems rather than leasing them from a handful of players, in the name of transparency, competition, and strategic independence.

Rombach acknowledges, however, the risks inherent in open access to image, video, and audio, where a model can be diverted toward illegal content and remains difficult to remove once made public. Open and responsible are not mutually exclusive, he asserts: Black Forest Labs claims that its latest open models have ten times fewer vulnerabilities to diversion toward sexual deepfakes or child sexual abuse material than other major players. He also calls on states to provide security tools, standards, and targeted regulation, and warns that a climate of fear surrounding openness would leave the world dependent on a few companies.