Ma­jor world lead­ers are meet­ing for an AI sum­mit in Paris, where chal­leng­ing diplo­mat­ic talks are ex­pect­ed as tech ti­tans fight for dom­i­nance in the fast-mov­ing tech­nol­o­gy in­dus­try.

Heads of state, top gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials, CEOs and sci­en­tists from around 100 coun­tries are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the two-day in­ter­na­tion­al sum­mit from Mon­day.

High-pro­file at­ten­dees in­clude U.S. Vice Pres­i­dent JD Vance, on his first over­seas trip since tak­ing of­fice, and Chi­nese Vice Pre­mier Zhang Guo­qing.

“We’re liv­ing a tech­nol­o­gy and sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tion we’ve rarely seen,” French Pres­i­dent Em­manuel Macron said Sun­day on na­tion­al tele­vi­sion France 2.

France and Eu­rope must seize the op­por­tu­ni­ty be­cause AI “will en­able us to live bet­ter, learn bet­ter, work bet­ter, care bet­ter and it’s up to us to put this ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence at the ser­vice of hu­man be­ings,” he said.

Vance’s de­but abroad

The sum­mit will give some Eu­ro­pean lead­ers a chance to meet Vance for the first time. The 40-year-old vice pres­i­dent was just 18 months in­to his time as Ohio’s ju­nior sen­a­tor when Don­ald Trump picked him as his run­ning mate.

Vance was joined by his wife Usha and their three chil­dren — Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel — for the trip to Eu­rope. They were greet­ed in France on Mon­day morn­ing by Manuel Valls, the min­is­ter for Over­seas France, and the U.S. Em­bassy’s charge d’af­faires, David Mc­Caw­ley.

Be­fore the trip, Vance made it clear that he in­tend­ed to use the op­por­tu­ni­ty for frank dis­cus­sions with Eu­ro­pean al­lies.

“At the AI Sum­mit, the main rea­son I’m go­ing is ac­tu­al­ly to have some pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions with the world lead­ers who are al­so go­ing to be there,” Vance told Bre­it­bart News. “I think there’s a lot that some of the lead­ers who are present at the AI sum­mit could do to, frankly — bring the Rus­sia-Ukraine con­flict to a close, help us diplo­mat­i­cal­ly there — and so we’re go­ing to be fo­cused on those meet­ings in France.”

On Tues­day, Vance will have a work­ing lunch with French Pres­i­dent Em­manuel Macron, with dis­cus­sions on Ukraine and the Mid­dle East on the agen­da. Vance, like the U.S. pres­i­dent, has ques­tioned U.S. spend­ing on Ukraine and the broad­er ap­proach to iso­lat­ing Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin. With­in six months of tak­ing of­fice, Trump promised to end the fight­ing.

Vance al­so ad­dressed what he views as a con­cern­ing trend in Eu­rope re­gard­ing free speech, a top­ic he raised last year dur­ing his at­ten­dance at the Mu­nich Se­cu­ri­ty Con­fer­ence.

“Un­for­tu­nate­ly, you’ve seen in Eu­rope a re­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant, and I think, frankly, an evil trend to­wards cen­sor­ship,” he said. “And you hear a lot about Amer­i­ca’s moral lead­er­ship. One of the things that Amer­i­ca’s moral lead­er­ship is go­ing to be about dur­ing Pres­i­dent Trump’s term is free speech. We want peo­ple to be able to speak their minds, and we be­lieve that free and open de­bate is ac­tu­al­ly a good thing. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, a lot of our Eu­ro­pean friends have gone the wrong di­rec­tion there.”

Lat­er this week, Vance will at­tend the Mu­nich Se­cu­ri­ty Con­fer­ence again, where he may meet with Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Ze­len­skyy. He plans to re­vis­it themes he raised last year, in­clud­ing the need for NA­TO al­lies to take on a greater share of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.

Lead­ers in Eu­rope have been care­ful­ly watch­ing Trump’s re­cent state­ments on threats to im­pose tar­iffs on the Eu­ro­pean Union, take con­trol of Green­land and his sug­ges­tion that Pales­tini­ans clear out of Gaza once the fight­ing in the Is­rael-Hamas con­flict ends — an idea that’s been flat­ly re­ject­ed by Arab al­lies.

Fos­ter­ing AI ad­vances

The sum­mit, which gath­ers ma­jor play­ers such as Google, Mi­crosoft and Ope­nAI, aims at fos­ter­ing AI ad­vances in sec­tors like health, ed­u­ca­tion, en­vi­ron­ment and cul­ture.

A glob­al pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship named “Cur­rent AI” will be launched to sup­port large-scale ini­tia­tives that serve the gen­er­al in­ter­est.

The Paris sum­mit “is the first time we’ll have had such a broad in­ter­na­tion­al dis­cus­sion in one place on the fu­ture of AI,” said Lin­da Grif­fin, vice pres­i­dent of pub­lic pol­i­cy at Mozil­la. “I see it as a norm-set­ting mo­ment.”

Nick Rein­ers, se­nior ge­ot­ech­nol­o­gy an­a­lyst at Eura­sia Group, not­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty to shape AI gov­er­nance in a new di­rec­tion by “mov­ing away from this con­cen­tra­tion of pow­er amongst a hand­ful of pri­vate ac­tors and build­ing this pub­lic in­ter­est AI in­stead.”

How­ev­er, it re­mains un­clear if the Unit­ed States will sup­port such ini­tia­tives.

“There’s a lot of com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions to re­solve” around is­sues like the abil­i­ty to con­trol AI sys­tems, No­bel Prize win­ner Demis Has­s­abis, founder of Google’s Deep­Mind re­search lab, said. “But al­so I think even more com­pli­cat­ed are maybe the geopo­lit­i­cal ques­tions about things like reg­u­la­tion.”

French or­ga­niz­ers are al­so look­ing for the sum­mit to ig­nite ma­jor in­vest­ment an­nounce­ments in Eu­rope, po­si­tion­ing the re­gion as a vi­able con­tender in an in­dus­try in­creas­ing­ly shaped by a grow­ing U.S.-Chi­na ri­val­ry.

France plans to an­nounce AI pri­vate in­vest­ments worth a to­tal of 109 bil­lion eu­ros ($113 bil­lion) over the com­ing years, Macron said, pre­sent­ing it as “the equiv­a­lent” of Trump’s Star­gate AI da­ta cen­ters project.

In Bei­jing, Chi­nese For­eign Min­istry spokesper­son Guo Ji­akun ex­pressed op­po­si­tion Mon­day to any moves to re­strict ac­cess to AI tools. The re­lease of DeepSeek has prompt­ed calls in the U.S. Con­gress to lim­it its use for se­cu­ri­ty rea­sons.

“We op­pose draw­ing ide­o­log­i­cal lines and op­pose over­stretch­ing na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty con­cepts and politi­ciz­ing eco­nom­ic and trade is­sues,” Guo said.

He said that Chi­na ad­vo­cates for open-source AI tech­nol­o­gy and pro­motes the ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty of AI ser­vices to share the ben­e­fits of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence with all coun­tries.

In­dia’s Mo­di is co-host­ing the sum­mit

Mo­di is co-host­ing the sum­mit with Macron in an ef­fort to in­volve more glob­al ac­tors in AI de­vel­op­ment and pre­vent the sec­tor from be­com­ing a U.S.-Chi­na bat­tle.

In­dia’s for­eign sec­re­tary, Vikram Mis­ri, stressed the need for eq­ui­table ac­cess to AI to avoid “per­pet­u­at­ing a dig­i­tal di­vide that is al­ready ex­ist­ing across the world.”

Macron will al­so trav­el on Wednes­day with Mo­di to the south­ern French port city of Mar­seille to in­au­gu­rate an In­di­an Con­sulate there and vis­it the ITER nu­clear re­search site.

France has be­come a key de­fense part­ner for In­dia, with talks un­der­way on New Del­hi pur­chas­ing 26 Rafale fight­er jets and three Scor­pene sub­marines. Of­fi­cials in In­dia said that dis­cus­sions are at the fi­nal phase and the deal could be inked in a few weeks.

Kelvin Chan in Paris, Ken Morit­sugu in Bei­jing, and Ai­jaz Hus­sain in New Del­hi, con­tributed to this re­port.

By SYLVIE COR­BET and AAMER MAD­HANI

Up­dat­ed 7:40 AM AST, Feb­ru­ary 10, 2025

PARIS (AP)