Major world leaders are gathering for an AI summit in Paris, where challenging diplomatic talks are taking place 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 attending 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.
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 on French soil Monday morning by Manuel Valls, the minister for Overseas France, and the U.S. Embassy’s charge d’affaires, David McCawley.
On Tuesday, Vance will have a working lunch with Macron, with discussions on Ukraine and the Middle East on the menu.
Vance, like President Donald Trump, has questioned U.S. spending on Ukraine and the approach to isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump promised to end the fighting within six months of taking office.
Vance will attend later this week the Munich Security Conference, where he may meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Leaders in Europe are watching carefully Trump’s recent statements on threats to impose tariffs on the European Union, take control of Greenland and his suggestion that Palestinians clear out 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 draws 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” is to 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,” remarked 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.”
