An artificial intelligence race is heating up between the United States and China — but don’t count Europe out.
That is the case President Emmanuel Macron of France made this week as his country hosts an A.I. summit in Paris, where government leaders, top tech executives and academic experts gathered on Monday to discuss the fears and hopes surrounding A.I technology.
“There’s a race to scale,” Mr. Macron told France 2 television on Sunday night under the soaring steel and glass roof of the Grand Palais, the exhibition hall where France and India have teamed up to hold the summit.
“Are we completely behind the curve? No,” Mr. Macron insisted as he urged Europe to invest heavily in its own A.I. abilities.
“We respect and want to work with the United States, we want to work with China, but we don’t want to depend on anyone,” he later added.
Attendees at the summit, which runs through Tuesday, include Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Zhang Guoqing, China’s vice premier; and Vice President JD Vance, who is on his first trip overseas.
France sees the summit as a crucial moment to spur A.I. investment in Europe, to get consumers on board with the fast-moving technology and to position Europe as a top contender — not just a leading regulator — in a global competition where the United States and China are so far the biggest players.
At similar gatherings in other countries, the focus was often on A.I.’s potential risks in terms of economic upheaval, disinformation and national security — like a 2023 summit in Britain that warned of the technology’s potentially “catastrophic” harm.
Those concerns remain. “So much of the last decade has been a story of technology tearing us apart,” Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford and co-director at the university’s Human-Centered A.I. Institute, said in the summit’s opening comments. “A.I. is at another fork in this road.”
But the global mood has also shifted as A.I. becomes widespread, and countries jostle to build the technology’s next giant.
Last month, President Trump announced the so-called Stargate initiative that could eventually invest as much as $500 billion over the next four years in computing infrastructure to power A.I. And China shocked the tech world with DeepSeek, a company that developed powerful artificial intelligence at a fraction of the cost of its American counterparts.
“If we want growth, jobs and progress, we have to allow innovators to innovate, builders to build and developers to develop,” Mr. Altman wrote in an opinion essay in the French newspaper Le Monde on Saturday. “The risk of inaction is too great to ignore.”
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Mr. Macron’s priority is ensuring that Europe does not fall behind the United States and China by overregulating its development.
He acknowledged the need for regulation — for instance, to protect intellectual property — but also pitched his fellow citizens on the benefits of A.I., calling it “a technological and scientific revolution like few we’ve seen before” and a “moment of opportunity for mankind.”
“If we regulate before we innovate, we won’t have any innovation of our own,” he said.
Investors at the conference shared his view, but warned that Europe was not as competitive as the United States or China because it had layers of regulations, higher taxes and fewer financial incentives.
France, Mr. Macron argued, is well positioned to lead Europe’s A.I. push, partly because it gets about 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy, allowing it to support power-hungry data centers without jeopardizing its climate change goals.
He added that more than 100 billion euros in A.I.-related investments in France would be announced during the summit, including a deal with the United Arab Emirates to fund an A.I. data center and campus in France.
Mr. Macron also argued in favor of what he called “European and French patriotism” to develop the next A.I. leaders — repeatedly urging people to download a chatbot developed by Mistral, France’s leading A.I. start-up, and praising the company’s partnership with Stellantis to equip the car maker’s vehicles with Mistral’s technology.
But the conference also laid bare a nagging issue facing world leaders: how to stay atop a growing A.I. arms race while managing its associated fears, ranging from job losses to “deepfake” misinformation.
“I want to find the balance between encouraging A.I innovation in the E.U. and mitigating the most serious risks,” said Henna Virkkunen, a European Commission executive vice president responsible for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.
The world’s biggest tech companies, led by U.S. giants like Meta, Google and OpenAI, are pushing for rapid development with lighter regulation and a global embrace of the idea that A.I. will serve, rather than harm, humankind.
But regulators, civil society activists and union leaders at the Paris summit warned of widespread concern among millions of people whose jobs and lifestyle will be most affected by rapid transformation.
“Are we losing a sense of the shared destiny of all human beings?” said Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s state secretary. “We need to ensure that A.I. realizes its potential to improve the situation of humanity.”
Airbus, the world’s largest plane maker, said it had integrated A.I. into many of its operations, including development and safety. It is one of more than 60 companies that have joined an E.U. A.I. Champions Initiative calling on Europe to become an A.I. global leader.
As one of the world’s biggest defense equipment makers, Airbus has increasingly integrated A.I. into its defense applications, raising ethical questions.
At the summit, Guillaume Faury, Airbus’s chief executive, acknowledged that “things are moving so fast,” but said that global leaders needed to make sure that A.I. “has to be good for society.”
That includes not letting A.I. take the driver’s seat, he added. “Keeping the human in the loop for us is essential — having someone who’s a human being be accountable,” Mr. Faury said.
