Paris AI summit draws world leaders and CEOs eager for lighter regulation

PARIS - World leaders and technology executives convened in Paris on Feb 10 to announce new investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and discuss how to safely embrace AI at a time of mounting resistance to red tape that businesses say stifles innovation.

Eagerness to rein in AI has waned since previous summits in Britain and South Korea that focused world powers’ attention on technology’s risks after ChatGPT’s viral launch in 2022.

As US President Donald Trump tears up his predecessor’s AI guard rails to promote American competitiveness, pressure has built on the European Union to pursue a lighter-touch approach to AI to help keep European firms in the technology race.

“If we want growth, jobs and progress, we must allow innovators to innovate, builders to build and developers to develop,” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in an op-ed in the French newspaper Le Monde ahead of the summit.

Some EU leaders including the AI Action Summit’s host, French President Emmanuel Macron, are hoping flexibility will be applied to the bloc’s new AI Act to help home-grown start-ups.

“There’s a risk some decide to have no rules and that’s dangerous. But there’s also the opposite risk, if Europe gives itself too many rules,” Mr Macron told regional French newspapers.

“We should not be afraid of innovation,” he said.

Mr Trump’s early moves on AI underscored how far the strategies to regulate AI in the United States, China and EU have diverged.

European lawmakers last year approved the bloc’s AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive set of rules governing the technology. Tech giants and some capitals want it to be enforced leniently.

Moreover, Mr Trump’s brakes-off approach has emboldened the regulation-cautious US Big Tech groups from which Europe needs to seek investment.

Meanwhile, China’s DeepSeek challenged US and British AI leadership last month by freely distributing a human-like reasoning system, galvanising geopolitical and industry rivals to race faster still.

More investments

One outcome from the summit was the launch of Current AI, a partnership of countries such as France and Germany and industry players including Google and Salesforce.

With an initial US$400 million (S$541.4 million) in investment, the partnership will spearhead public-interest projects that include making high-quality data for AI available and investing in open-source tools. It is aiming for up to US$2.5 billion in capital over five years.

Current AI founder Martin Tisne said a public-interest focus was needed to avoid AI having downsides like social media. “We have to have learnt the lessons,” he said.

Separately, France will announce private sector investments totalling some €109 billion (S$152.4 billion) during the summit, Mr Macron said on Feb 9.

“The size of this €100 billion investment reassured us, in a way, that there’s going to be ambitious enough projects in France,” said Mr Clem Delangue, the chief executive of Hugging Face, a US company with French co-founders that is a hub for open-source AI online.

Mr Delangue said his company would double its investment in France to hire more staff and focus on technology including robotics, but he declined to say how much that would amount to.

Delegations are discussing non-binding statements about the stewardship of AI and about managing AI’s massive energy needs as the planet gets hotter.

Risks

Not everyone in Paris agreed with taking a lighter-touch approach to AI regulation.

In terms of regulation, “it’s sort of a night and day difference between the US and the EU right now”, said Mr Brian Chen, policy director at Data & Society, a US-based non-profit organisation which researches the social implications of AI.

“What I worry about is that... there will be pressures from the US and elsewhere to weaken the EU’s AI Act and weaken those existing protections,” he said.

Labour leaders expressed concerns over the impact of AI on workers, including what happens to workers whose jobs are taken over by AI and are pushed into new jobs.

“There is a risk of those jobs being much less paid and sometimes with much less protection,” said Mr Gilbert F. Houngbo, director-general of the International Labour Organisation.

Top political leaders including US Vice-President J.D. Vance and China’s Vice-Premier Zhang Guoqing will attend the summit. Mr Macron is due to meet Mr Zhang on Feb 10 and Mr Vance on Feb 11, the French President’s office said.

Top executives such as Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Altman are slated to give talks as well. REUTERS