Striking A(I) Balance

Paris hosted the AI Summit last month, with regulation and, with a bit more weight, innovation being the talk of the town.

Ranging from its role in the Indo-Pacific to now AI development, France has championed being a “third way”, or balancing power, between allies. The AI Summit, and the French declarations that resulted from it, suggest that France’s attempt at striking an equilibrium might be effective to spur responsible AI innovation and ensure it will have a meaningful impact.

France First: Bolstering National Innovation

In his speech during the AI Summit in Paris, American Vice President J.D. Vance emphasized the political priorities that would guide the Trump Administration’s AI policy. He made clear that Made in America would be the starting point for any partnership or collaboration. The Vice President attempted to strike a more conciliatory tone in his conclusion, highlighting the long partnership between France and the United States. Pointing to the strong innovative foundations built from the times of “Lafayette” and the “American Founders,” he said, “We must focus now on the opportunity to catch lightning in a bottle, unleash our most brilliant innovators, and use AI to improve the well-being of our nations and their peoples.”

Vance’s emphasis on bolstering innovation and the American AI ecosystem does find a mirrored approach in the French AI industry. President Emmanuel Macron has long championed running a “start-up nation” since he took office in 2017. This has spurred increased public investments which resulted in over 600 AI startups in France in recent years. The French National Strategy around Artificial Intelligence pushes investment in research (France stands third in Europe) and emphasizes attracting AI talent to bolster national strength. The AI strategy is also bolstered by the “Choose France” effort that President Macron has pushed to attract more foreign direct investment and make France attractive to industry. France’s AI Champion, Mistral, is a good reflection of the challenges of balancing the current EU regulatory landscape with the need to encourage innovation Vance emphasized throughout his speech.

Mistral is a heavy-weight player in AI, able to compete with the likes of Google and OpenAI. During the AI-summit the French company announced a very France-first initiative. Previously operating on models and infrastructure run by US-giants such as AWS and Microsoft, Mistral attracted major investments to build its own data center in France. In line with the EU’s Green Deal ambitions, as well as the Draghi report’s argument that sustainability is key to the EU’s competitiveness, Mistral announced that the new data center would be fully powered by decarbonized energy. France is able to champion its strength in nuclear power and build a strong-argument for “Choose France” all while in line with EU ambitions to combat climate change and promote clean energy. And yet, at the same time, Mistral has continued to be one of the companies (among them Apple and Meta) that refuse to sign the AI Pact, a voluntary pledge sought by the European Commission (and in line with the EU’s AI Act) to implement transparency and risk assessment measures for AI classified as high-risk. Over 130 signatories have been collected so far. Mistral has hung back for now, urging more regulatory caution while attempting to strengthen its market position. Recently, Mistral’s CEO stated that regulation is in a “workable state” but “not ideal." It still remains to be seen whether or not Mistral will sign the Code of Practice, which Meta and Google have so far refused to sign.

The regulatory winds in Europe are changing. Most recently, the EU announced initiatives to increase competitiveness via the Competitive Compass. European Commission President von der Leyen stressed at the Summit that the EU wants to cut the red tape around regulation. France, with Mistral as its example, could champion and help guide an in-between approach of encouraging innovation without overregulation.

And…France Second: Encouraging Cooperative Sovereignty

Beyond the idea of “France first,” is also a complementary approach of “France second.” In partnership with India, its AI Summit co-chair, France championed an open-source approach to AI, a true “strategy of the seconds,” aiming to break free from the Sino-American rising duopoly. As Gaël Varoquaux, French AI expert puts it, in the AI race, “when you’re not first, you need to team up with the third, fourth, and fifth to try to catch up.”

Catching up, then, is critical. Building on their longstanding defense and civil nuclear energy ties, the French and Indian leaders have made tech mutual sovereignty a shared priority. “We [France and India] respect and want to work with the United States and China,” President Macron asserted during the Summit, “but we don’t want to depend on anyone.”

Rather than pouring billions into proprietary, closed AI systems like OpenAI, the Franco-Indian coalition embraces openness. By funding and developing freely available AI building blocks, researchers and companies can combine and customize these pieces to create their own tailored AI solutions in the international market. In this regard, the Chinese champion “Deepseek” appears to have been one of the first to pave the way for large-scale open-source AI, attracting a large following from those who believe that AI should not “be locked behind paywalls.”

Concrete steps underscore this resolve. “Current AI,” announced at the Summit, is a $400 million public interest AI platform and incubator. It is supported by several countries ranging from Germany to Chile, and deemed essential by Indian Prime Minister Modi to democratize AI access. The aim is to lower barriers to entry and encourage the adoption of customizable AI tools, building a more agile, plug-and-play approach. The hope is that the result is a more inclusive AI ecosystem, where smaller players can leverage shared resources and - hopefully - collectively compete with major tech superpowers.

Beyond Summit Declarations

Next year, the AI Summit is scheduled to convene in India, reflecting the deeper Indo-French alignment and the hope that a decentralized, transparent AI ecosystem can reconcile diverse - some would say conflicting - interests while safeguarding global innovation and benefiting the whole of humanity. With the U.S. and the UK refusing to sign the Summit declaration, broader questions hover around the future of AI. The Summit gathered some of the best talent, minds and thinkers around AI in the world, and what needs to be watched now is what happens beyond Paris walls.

Policy will always struggle to keep pace with technology innovation. Only days after the Summit concluded, Microsoft unveiled a startling breakthrough in quantum chip technology. This development could radically reshape computing as we know it, offering a level of processing power once confined to theoretical speculation. While experts disagree on how soon quantum computing will be widely usable - some predict decades, others just a few years - it's clear that Summit declarations will have to come to fruition outside of Paris in order to brace for the future of AI.

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