G7 Finance Chiefs Worried over Impacts of Middle East Crisis

Paris, May 19 (Jiji Press)--Finance ministers and top central bankers from the Group of Seven major industrialized nations expressed their concerns Tuesday over the impacts of the prolonged Middle East crisis.

"We acknowledge that global economic uncertainty has heightened risks to growth and to inflation amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East," the officials from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States plus the European Union said in a joint statement adopted at their two-day meeting in Paris through the day.

"A swift return to free and safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz and a lasting resolution to the conflict are imperative" to mitigate these negative impacts, the statement added.

The officials agreed to promote efforts to address risks of cyberattacks that use advanced artificial intelligence models, saying that an expert group of the G7 will "enhance information sharing and identify best practices."

The G7 nations will come up with specific countermeasures against such cyberattacks in the run-up to their summit in June, after U.S. startup Anthropic developed Claude Mythos, a cutting-edge AI model highly capable of identifying vulnerabilities in systems.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]