Paris hosts AI summit as France looks to challenge US dominance

Macron explicitly framed the investment as France’s answer to the US’ $500 billion Stargate project, which panicked European tech when it was announced in January: “It knocked everyone out… You suddenly felt a gloominess descend, with people saying we’ll never be able to raise so much money,” a Paris-based AI expert told Politico. Then Chinese startup DeekSeek released an apparently low-cost, high-performing chatbot, raising hopes that resource-strapped European tech firms could yet be key players in AI innovation, Semafor reported. France sees particular promise in open-source models, where source code is made freely available to all developers, but “advocating openness…does not guarantee ethical AI,” nor prevent a potentially dangerous race toward superintelligence, a columnist argued in Le Monde.

The EU’s regulation of AI is expected to be a talking point at the summit as new rules come into force: “Navigating our regulations here feels like solving a puzzle where the pieces keep changing,” the managing director of Amazon Web Services Europe told Euronews. It’s a familiar criticism — tech companies “always want to say that the EU is cumbersome and bureaucratic, and now they attach that to AI,” an expert currently drafting a voluntary set of rules for advanced AI models told Politico. However, Brussels seems to be taking note: Having focused on AI safety during her first term, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is now concentrating on making the continent a “global leader” in innovation.