The Paris summit pivots from safety to opportunity

The event that had been the Bletchley Park “AI Safety Summit” in November 2023 and the Seoul “AI Safety Summit” in May 2024 was held for a third time in Paris on 10–11 February 2025, renamed the “AI Action Summit.” The change of name tracked a change of emphasis: where Bletchley had produced a declaration focused on frontier-model risk, Paris was organised around investment, infrastructure and economic opportunity, with French President Emmanuel Macron announcing a domestic AI investment package alongside the summit.

The summit closed with a “Statement on Inclusive and Sustainable Artificial Intelligence for People and the Planet,” covering AI accessibility, market concentration, labour effects and international governance cooperation, and launching a Public Interest AI Platform to fund AI public goods projects in participating countries. More than 60 governments signed, including France, Germany, China, India, Japan and Canada. The United States and the United Kingdom did not.

US Vice President JD Vance used his address — his first foreign-soil speech since the inauguration — to argue against what he called an “excessive regulatory” approach to AI, warning that over-regulation would hand the technology’s advantages to authoritarian competitors and that “American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.” He pointed to Trump’s 23 January executive order and the forthcoming AI action plan as the American alternative. A UK government spokesperson said the declaration “had not gone far enough in addressing global governance of AI and the technology’s impact on national security,” while stressing the decision reflected UK national interest rather than alignment with Washington.

The summit is generally read as the moment the diplomatic consensus behind the Bletchley process broke: the US delegation’s tone, and its and Britain’s refusal to sign a document most other major economies endorsed, made visible a divide between an American and British emphasis on competitiveness and a continental European emphasis on inclusive, precautionary governance that persisted through subsequent summits.