World leaders, executives urge more leniency in Europe at Paris AI summit

Paris — World leaders and technology executives convened in Paris on Monday to 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 the technology’s risks after ChatGPT’s viral launch in 2022.

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

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

Some EU leaders including the summit’s host, French President Emmanuel Macron, also hope 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,” Macron told regional French newspapers.

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

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

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

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

Differences

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

In terms of regulation, “it’s sort of a night and day difference, between the US and the EU right now,” said Brian Chen, policy director at Data & Society, a US-based nonprofit that 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.

Yoshua Bengio, considered one of the “Godfathers of AI”, said at an event on the sidelines on Sunday that frontier AI already had shown a capacity for deception and self-preservation, in a harbinger of future risks.

“I’m speaking my mind to anyone who wants to hear it,” said Bengio. “I’m not going to stop.”

Meanwhile, labour leaders expressed concerns on the effect of AI on workers.

The claim that AI will bring about new jobs is no simple fix for professions’ displacement, said Gilbert F Houngbo, director-general of the International Labour Organisation.

“There is a risk of those jobs being much less paid and sometimes with much less protection,” he said.

UNI Global Union general secretary Christy Hoffman said there would be a pledge asking employers coming out of the summit that highlights social dialogue and bargaining as AI proliferates.

Top political leaders including US vice-president JD Vance and China vice-premier Zhang Guoqing will attend the summit. Macron is due to meet Zhang on Monday and Vance on Tuesday, the French president’s office said.

Top executives, such as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Altman, are slated to give talks as well.

Delegations are also expected to talk about managing AI’s massive energy needs as the planet gets hotter and AI for the developing world. A non-binding statement is being discussed.

France will announce private sector investments totalling about €109bn during the summit, Macron said.

Reuters

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