Vice President JD Vance Resets the Global AI Agenda with Paris AI Action Summit Address

Today in France, Vice President JD Vance delivered a powerful keynote address at the Paris Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit that reset the global dialogue on international AI policy.

His speech was a full-throated rejection of European-style, risk-averse, speech-limiting, precautionary principle-oriented regulation. Instead, Vance’s address represented a succinct articulation of a pro-U.S., future-embracing, entrepreneurialism-focused, permissionless innovation-oriented vision for AI and digital technology.

From the outset, Vance made it clear that he was refocusing the global AI policy discussion. “I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago,” he said. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.”

He then explained how:

AI will have countless revolutionary applications in economic innovation, job creation, national security, health care, free expression and beyond, and to restrict its development now will not only unfairly benefit incumbents in this space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.

But it can only happen by getting policy right, Vance noted. “[W]e believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off, and we will make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies,” he said.

This was a significant departure from past AI summits, where the tone and resulting recommendations were pessimistic and foreboding. Wired described the 2023 AI Safety Summit in the United Kingdom as a “doom-obsessed mess.” At those previous summits, anti-innovation interest groups looked to slow or even pause the development of AI systems.  

Vance’s remarks in Paris made it clear that the U.S. government wants no part of those efforts. His address also represented “a 180-degree turnaround from what we saw with the Biden administration” on AI policy, as a leading AI expert with the Oxford Internet Institute noted. 

The Biden approach to AI policy—as articulated most notably in a historically long executive order (EO) and the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights”—was fundamentally fear-based, arguing that algorithmic systems are “unsafe, ineffective, or biased,” “deeply harmful,” and “threaten the rights of the American public.”

The current administration began reversing that pessimistic policy approach by revoking Biden’s EO and replacing it with a new one during President Donald J. Trump’s first week in office. A recent R Street comparison of the old Biden EO versus Trump’s new EO noted that “[u]nder the Biden policy statements and EO, AI was less about opportunities to be embraced and more about dangers to be avoided.”

Thus, Vance’s Paris speech concludes a rapid one-month course-correction for the way America formulates AI policy both domestically and internationally.

Perhaps the most important portion of Vance’s Paris speech was the way he identified the opportunity for partnerships with other countries looking to advance AI in a “spirit of openness and collaboration.” But he rightly noted the need for “international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technologies rather than strangle it.” He then specifically identified how Europe had a choice to make at this moment in history: “We need our European friends in particular to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation.”

This is the most crucial aspect of Vance’s speech, because with it, the Trump administration is leaving the door open for Europe to chart a new course and regain its place as a global leader in advanced technology as China advances their own capabilities. America needs Europe to work with us to stop the spread of authoritarian regimes looking to use AI as a tool of repression instead of a technology of freedom and opportunity.

But to do so, Vance noted, Europe will need to adopt a superior innovation policy vision for their own continent while also ceasing their quest to punish American AI market leaders at every juncture. As he said in his remarks, “the Trump administration is troubled by reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening the screws on U.S. tech companies with international footprints. America cannot and will not accept that, and we think it’s a terrible mistake—not just for the United States, but for your own countries.”

Indeed, if U.S. tech companies are hobbled by layers of excessive, risk-averse regulation, it not only hurts America, it also hurts Europe because it opens the door for autocratic governments to fill the void once all that regulation has decimated Western technology companies and markets. 

This danger was discussed in a new R Street analysis on the ramifications of the recent “DeepSeek moment,” which serves as a wake-up call for America on why it is essential for the country to get its AI innovation culture right. It is not merely about advancing global competitiveness and innovative outcomes; it is also about ensuring that other important values—pluralism, liberty, democracy, free speech, privacy, and civil rights—continue to thrive globally.

Europe has squandered this opportunity over the past quarter-century and “has abdicated its role in history,” as one Hudson Institute scholar argued. “Economically, our European partners and friends are failing the test of the digital age, generating neither the new technologies nor companies that the 21st-century demands,” he concluded. In this “post-European world,” autocratic states like China could gain greater sway in global technology markets and have more influence over speech outcomes.

The European Union is suffering from this competitiveness crisis due to the imposition of many layers of restrictive policies on digital innovators—which now includes a complicated new AI act—that has discouraged innovation and investment across the continent. America must commit itself to a different path than Europe, and Vance’s speech at the Paris AI Summit is a major step in the right direction. “The United States is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way,” he insisted. 

While that may come across as arrogant to some global leaders, it is exactly the message they need to hear today. It will hopefully encourage them to race alongside us and ensure that AI reaches its full potential as China and other nations look to advance their own algorithmic capabilities, but with very different goals in mind. As Vance correctly noted, embracing AI opportunity is key to ensuring that result.