RPT-BREAKINGVIEWS-Paris summits go from green accord to AI discord

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

By Karen Kwok

LONDON, Feb 11 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Paris is the city of choice for striking consequential global accords. In 2015, a conference for the world’s major polluters in the French capital culminated in a historic agreement to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. In 2025, President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to strike a similarly significant accord on artificial intelligence has fallen well short of the mark.

Macron’s two-day gathering had the right look about it: it attracted global politicians from U.S. Vice President JD Vance to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and tech titans like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. But when it came to signing a list of AI priorities, including ensuring that the field is “open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy”, the United States and the United Kingdom sat it out even though 60 other countries including China signed. Their justification is a combination of genuine differences, plus hard-nosed politics.

How to regulate AI has long been a live debate, with safety and innovation at opposite ends of the spectrum. With its AI Act, which requires minimum levels of transparency and disclosure from general purpose AI models, the European Union has tacked towards the former. In Paris, Vance made it abundantly clear that the U.S. was firmly at the other end: he lambasted the “massive regulations” in the likes of the EU Digital Services Act, and warned excessive oversight could kill a transformative industry.

In reality, neither the EU nor the U.S. position is so clear cut. Macron has been keen to soften some of the AI Act’s hard edges, and also used the conference to tout a 109 billion euro AI infrastructure programme he intentionally compared to the $500 billion Stargate venture on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile draft texts of AI regulations in some U.S. states such as California and Texas are similar to Europe’s AI Act, according to Boston Consulting Group’s Kirsten Rulf.

That said, the U.S. is in a position to throw its weight around. Startups there attracted 74% of global AI venture capital in 2024 and raised a total of $81 billion, 10 times more than any other country, per Dealroom data. Vance was keen to point out that of the $700 billion of approximate AI-related R&D investment due in 2028, over half would be in the U.S. Throw in the fact Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Andreessen Horowitz are enthusiastic supporters of both President Donald Trump and minimal barriers to AI advancement, and Washington had little incentive to restrict itself even via Macron’s woolly statement.

Some sort of protection against AI models’ tendency towards hallucination and other mishaps suggest a zero-barriers approach is far from a great idea. Even so, arguably the only consensus from Paris 2025 is that the world is moving more in that direction.

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CONTEXT NEWS

U.S. Vice President JD Vance told Europeans on February 11 that their “massive” regulations on artificial intelligence could strangle the technology, and rejected content moderation as “authoritarian censorship”.

The United States and Britain did not sign up to the final statement of a French-hosted AI summit that said AI should be inclusive, open, ethical and safe. The two countries did not immediately explain why they had not signed the AI summit’s declaration, as shown by a published text, while at least 60 countries including China had done so.

Setting out the Trump administration’s America First agenda, Vance said the United States intended to remain the dominant force in AI and strongly opposed the European Union’s far tougher regulatory approach.

“We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry,” Vance told the summit of CEOs and heads of state in Paris. “We feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.”

Vance criticised the “massive regulations” created by the EU’s Digital Services Act, as well as Europe’s online privacy rules, known by the acronym GDPR, which he said meant endless legal compliance costs for smaller firms.