The key takeaway from the AI Action Summit in Paris is not that the U.S. did not sign the final declaration: it is the emergence of a new AI bloc comprised of Europe and much of the rest of the world, built around open source.
Some 58 of the countries attending the summit – which together represent one half of the global population – signed a statement committing to promoting AI accessibility to reduce digital divides; ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, security and trustworthy; avoiding market concentration; and making AI sustainable for people and planet.
The statement was a rejection of the U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s notion that the U.S. is winning the global AI race and can dictate the terms.
“This administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide,” Vance told the collection of world leaders—including Summit co-hosts French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—gathered February 11 for the AI summit in the French capital. He warned against international efforts that might impose restrictions on U.S. tech firms and cautioned against the European Union’s regulatory approach. “The A.I. future is not going to be won by handwringing about safety,” he said. “The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American design and manufactured chips.”
Many governments are not comfortable with that vision of the future. During the Summit they expressed concern about concentration of power in the hands of a few AI companies and the need for guardrails around the technology’s development, said Philippe Huberdeau, the French Government’s Secretary General of Scaleup Europe-AI Action Summit. This is fueling search for an alternative AI model which is human-centric, trustworthy and community driven and is leading countries to accept that there is much to be gained by working together on what Anne Bouverot, the French President’s Special Envoy for the AI Action Summit, calls an AI Commons.
Summit speaker Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, was among those who emphasized that rather than viewing AI uniquely through a competitive lens, a collaborative approach is needed that includes shared resources, open innovation, and using AI for the public good.
To that end, Current AI, an initiative prioritizing open-source principles to ensure AI remains decentralized, democratic, and accessible to all, was launched during the Summit, with $400 million in initial funding from a host of entities including the Patrick J. McGovern and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundations, French government, Google and Salesforce. Among the stated aims of The Current AI effort -which also has backing from Chile, Finland, Germany, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Slovenia and Switzerland- are expanding access to high-quality public and private datasets, investing in open-source tools and infrastructure and developing systems to measure AI’s social and environmental impact.
The Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative also launched at the AI Action Summit in Paris. It addresses an important gap in digital safety—especially online child safety—by providing free, open-source safety tools to public and private organizations of all sizes across the globe. Incubated at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, ROOST is a new global non-profit organization that brings together the expertise, resources, and investments of major technology companies and philanthropies to build scalable, interoperable safety infrastructure suited for the AI era. ROOST’s founding partners include the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Eric Schmidt, Discord, OpenAI, Google, Roblox, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, AI Collaborative, Patrick J. McGovern and Project Liberty Institute.
A Public Interest AI platform and incubator to decrease fragmentation between existing public and private initiatives and address digital divides with the goal of supporting and co-creating “a trustworthy AI ecosystem advancing the public interest of all for all and by all” was separately announced by France, India, Germany, Finland, Slovenia, Kenya, Chile, Nigeria and Morocco.
These new global collaborative initiatives are building on work of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), an initiative started by France and Canada in 2018 that focuses on human-centric, safe, secure and trustworthy AI, said Huberdeau. The group now has more than 60 countries as members. It further enlarged its membership during the AI Action Summit and added the OECD as its secretariat.
Though it is early days the formation of this new AI bloc, coupled with the efficiencies demonstrated by China’s DeepSeek which has developed AI reasoning models that appear to be on par with U.S. companies OpenAI and Anthropic, at significantly lower cost, are fueling optimism that the closed large language models that U.S. AI players are spending billions on are not necessarily the future and U.S. AI domination in not inevitable.
Strengthening Regional and National Ambitions
“Too often, I hear that Europe is late to the race – while the U.S. and China have already gotten ahead,” European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen said during her speech at the summit. “I disagree. Because the AI race is far from over. Truth is, we are only at the beginning. The frontier is constantly moving, and global leadership is still up for grabs. And behind the frontier, lies the whole world of AI adoption. AI has only just begun to be adopted in the key sectors of our economy, and for the key challenges of our times. This should be Europe’s focus. Bringing AI to industry-specific applications and harnessing its power for productivity and people. This is where Europe can truly lead the race. So, Europe has everything to gain.”
The European approach, which embraces the power of open source, is showing results but now needs to be “supercharged,” she said.
The Role of Regulation
As expected, U.S. and UK tech leaders lectured Europe about over regulating AI.
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman compared the global AI race to a soccer game, with the U.S. and China playing against each other and Europe acting as a referee imposing a lot of rules. Nobody, he reminded the audience, likes the referee.
Europe is not going to change its approach to AI safety and data privacy, but it is recognizing that reporting requirements put undue burdens on young companies. In her speech van der Leyen said she was working on making improvements.
Young AI startups like France’s Mistral AI, which has a valuation of $6 billion, and research projects are doing well despite Europe’s AI and data regulations. (See The Innovator’s Startup of The Week story about Mistral AI).
During a special session of the AI Action Summit, neuroscientist Olivier Oullier and his co-founder Paul Barbaste demonstrated PrometheysBCI, a non-invasive multi-modal brain-computer interface developed by their company, Inclusive Brains, in partnership with Allianz Trade, which leverages the combination of Generative AI and Brain-Computer Interface to improve the inclusion of people who lost the ability to move because of life accidents or neurodegenerative diseases. During the demo Barbaste completed and submitted to French Parliament President Yael Braun-Pivet an amendment to a €100 billion AI investment bill completely hands-free: without touching a keyboard, a mouse or a screen and without using vocal commands.
Summit attendees were given a demo of Hibiki, a state-of-the-art voice to voice AI technology for simultaneous translation over smart phones developed by Kyutai, a French AI institute co-founded by French tech tycoon Xavier Niel.
“AI is like a swimming competition and Europe is the [French Olympic gold medal winner] Leon Marchand that can complete with less muscle, less money, and probably less créatine, and go a little more underwater before winning a lot of races,” mused Thomas Clozel, CEO of French AI biotech Owkin, an AI Action Summit attendee, in a LinkedIn post.
Rather than being a brake on innovation and competitiveness some see Europe’s regulatory approach as a plus.
“Our regulatory environment, combined with our deep expertise in regulated industries, positions us uniquely to build trust-first AI solutions in high risk, high reward settings,” says a blog post by Laura Connell, a partner in the venture firm Atomico and Andreas Cleve, CEO and co-founder of Corti, a generative AI healthcare company. “The opportunity is massive. True first-mover advantage in AI won’t come from being first to market — it will come from being first to earn trust in the sectors where AI can have the most profound impact.”
Mobilizing Money
During the summit an initiative was unveiled to mobilize €200 billion for AI in Europe:a €50 billion investment from the EU alongside a new €150 billion EU AI Champions Initiative led by US VC General Catalyst and over 20 other investors and over 70+ organizations, representing $3+ trillion in public market cap, and over 3.7M jobs across Europe. The list of backers includes Airbus, Philips, Henkel, L’Oreal, Volkswagen, TotalEnergies, Lufthansa, as well as rising players such as Helsing, Mistral AI and Owkin.
Details around the EU AI Champions initiative are still a bit fuzzy. No time frame was mentioned for the private sector funding, and it is unclear how backers will be held accountable for their financial commitments.
Still, van der Leyen said she is optimistic that the new private sector investment, coupled with EU funds, will mark a turning point in the development of European AI.
“Together with our member states and with our partners, we will mobilize unprecedented capital through InvestAI for European AI gigafactories, she said in a statement. “This unique public-private partnership, akin to a CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] for AI, will enable all our scientists and companies – not just the biggest – to develop the most advanced very large models needed to make Europe an AI continent.”
The EU’s InvestAI fund will finance four future AI gigafactories across the EU. The new AI gigafactories will be specialized in training the most complex, very large, AI models. Such next-generation models require extensive computing infrastructure for breakthroughs in specific domains such as medicine or science. The gigafactories will have around 100 000 last-generation AI chips, around four times more than the AI factories being set up right now, according to the EU.
The gigafactories funded through InvestAI will be the largest public-private partnership in the world for the development of trustworthy AI and “will serve the European model of cooperative, open innovation, with a focus on complex industrial and mission-critical applications,” according to an EU press release.
Meanwhile French president Emmanuel Macron said the fast pace of AI developments are a wake-up call for Europe and used the occasion of the Summit to promote France’s own AI ambitions. Macron announced he will funnel €109 billion into AI investments over the next five years, which he noted is proportionally equivalent, when adjusted for market size, to recent U.S. announcements about Stargate, a high-profile artificial intelligence infrastructure partnership that involves OpenAI, Oracle, Japan’s Softbank – led by Masayoshi Son – and MGX, a tech investment arm of the United Arab Emirates government, which aims to spend $500 billion on new compute infrastructure. (MGX is also an investor in France’s new AI infrastructure project)
Macron also positioned France’s nuclear energy infrastructure as a crucial differentiator in the global AI race. He argued that France’s nuclear-based electricity grid, producing more than 75% of the country’s power, provides abundant low-carbon, controllable energy – a critical advantage for power-hungry AI data centers.
The president announced that France has identified 35 sites ready for immediate data center development, supported by the country’s energy surplus. Infrastructure development will be accelerated through what Macron termed the “Notre-Dame approach,” referencing the cathedral’s rapid reconstruction. “We showed the rest of the world that when we commit to a clear timeline, we can deliver,” he said, promising to streamline procedures for data centers and market authorizations using the same focused, results-driven methodology.
Sovereignty Through Collaboration
AI Action Summit participant Mozilla President Mark Surman warns, however, that it would be a mistake for individual countries to think they can combat the domination of U.S. AI players on their own. “Sovereignty through collaboration is how to achieve both cultural and economic success, otherwise countries are going to end up as branch plants of the West Coast of America and China,” Surman said in an interview with The Innovator (see The Innovator’s Interview Of The Week.)
“I really hope that companies and countries outside of the U.S. and China find common cause around open source AI and build their own industries and infrastructure on top,” says Surman. “Countries need to get the message that you are not going to be able to go it alone and achieve sovereignty. If countries pull resources together and out invest the bigger AI players on the underlying infrastructure, they can build sovereignty on top of that.” About 20% of the underlying infrastructure can be pooled, he says. “It will give countries a robust head start, and then they can build their own sovereignty from there. This is where the opportunity lies.”
Surman says he hopes the next Summit will see more countries, including smaller ones, participate and join open source AI projects. “I’d like to see countries work in common on open source AI as a way to get the economic positioning and growth that they need,” he says. “Ideally, we will end up with a third AI bloc banding together.”
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