PARIS — World leaders aren’t worried that artificial intelligence will make humanity extinct or be misused by terrorists.
They seemed much more concerned about not winning the global AI race when they met at the AI Action Summit in Paris this week.
French President Emmanuel Macron, U.S. Vice President JD Vance, India’s Narendra Modi, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the United Kingdom’s tech secretary Peter Kyle all focused on innovation and investment in their speeches at the event.
Safety fears, top of mind at two previous AI summits in the U.K. and South Korea, barely featured. The final summit declaration mentioned safety only three times. The United States and the U.K. didn’t even sign the final declaration.
Instead, politicians touted massive investments and promised light regulation.
“I’m not here to talk about AI safety, I’m here to talk about AI opportunity,” Vance said.
“This summit is focused on action, and that’s exactly what we need right now,” added von der Leyen, before announcing the roll-out of a multi-billion euro investment plan.
Changing course
The pivot from AI safety and governance to clinching deals and enabling AI companies was long in the making.
France had purposely branded the event an “Action” summit, in stark contrast with the U.K.’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023, at which major tech companies committed to establishing safety frameworks.
“We’ve reduced references to the Bletchley Summit to the minimum,” a French official admitted. This came at a cost, as the U.K. decided not to sign the Paris declaration.
Timing also played a part, with a series of AI shocks in the weeks before the summit highlighting the global race between the U.S., China and the European Union.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s $500 billion AI hardware plan and the cancellation of his predecessor’s AI safety rules planted a flag for U.S. determination to win the AI race. Only days later, the markets erased billions of dollars from AI companies when a Chinese rival showed it could also develop AI models at low cost.
Vance urged European countries, the global frontrunners in regulating AI, to embrace “the new frontier of AI with optimism and not trepidation.”
Political realities in Brussels have also shifted.
Von der Leyen is now focusing on unlocking growth for the region’s slowing economy. The deployment of AI is a top priority to achieve that goal.
“Global AI leadership is still up for grabs,” von der Leyen said during her speech at the closing ceremony. “Europe is open for AI and for business,” she posted on Bluesky on Tuesday evening.
Although Vance blasted the EU’s “onerous international rules” for tech, which he said stifle innovation and create unnecessary hurdles for U.S. businesses, he and von der Leyen are far more aligned on AI. Where Vance called for rules that won’t strangle the burgeoning industry, von der Leyen promised the EU would cut red tape.
The EU’s tech sovereignty chief, Henna Virkkunen, also made the rounds in Paris, promising to make the EU’s regulatory framework more “innovation-friendly.”
She pledged to simplify AI and tech rules as part of the EU ‘s efforts to simplify regulation.
“I’m also taking this criticism very seriously that we’re getting” from small businesses and industry “that we have too much bureaucracy and red tape,” she said.
That doesn’t mean the EU is abandoning its rules, with von der Leyen mentioning the new AI Act as a single set of safety rules for the bloc. But her announcement to free up tens of billions of euros for AI computing power sucked up most of the attention.
Macron, meanwhile, used the summit to announce the investment of €109 billion in AI in the coming years.
The French president also emphasized the need for the EU to become a leader in AI applications at a hot-ticket dinner he hosted on Monday night, surrounded by Vance, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and senior officials from around the world, including China.
Dinner guests made few references to safety issues, except for Meredith Whittaker, an AI ethics campaigner who heads the Signal messaging app, who highlighted the need to protect privacy.
Existential risk crowd
The politicians’ change of tone went down well with the AI industry, especially given the heavy regulatory scrutiny that some like chatbot pioneer OpenAI have faced in Europe.
OpenAI executives highlighted the political pivot at a reception for reporters on the sidelines of the summit, even as they said safety issues still need to be addressed and that wider confidence in AI needs to grow.
“But we also have to be willing and embrac[e] the innovation because perhaps the biggest risk of all is actually missing out on the economic opportunities that come from this technology,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, told reporters.
One AI company broke ranks, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying in a statement that “international conversations on AI must more fully address the technology’s growing security risks.”
AI companies published updated safety frameworks over the week, which they pledged at a safety-focused summit in Seoul last May.
They made no new commitments, however, alarming those who worry about AI’s existential risks. Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Foundation, which focuses on AI’s potential harm, described the final declaration as a “huge step backwards.”
“It actually negates the consensus from Bletchley,” he said, comparing the Paris event with the 2023 summit.
Digital rights groups also expressed their discontent with the softer approach politicians were taking toward companies.
Brussels-based digital rights group EDRi slammed the EU’s decision to include the AI Act in a regulatory simplification push.
“With this, [Virkkunen] fuels deregulation, appeases U.S. and tech corporations, while ruining civil society’s few, but hard-won human rights victories in the AI Act,” said Blue Duangdjai Tiyavorabun, EDRi’s policy adviser.
The U.K.’s delegate to the event, Peter Kyle, was less concerned, marking the new Labour government’s focus on growth.
“I think the thing to do is to understand what the purpose of safety is,” he said.
“My criticism of the Bletchley Summit was, it was 100 percent about safety,” he said. Since then the new government “has spent a huge amount of energy just, just balancing that so that … now we’ve got the safety aspect done … we’re putting that safety to work.”
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