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France hosts February 10-11 summit

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Tech companies say regulation can stifle innovation

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Trump has torn up recent AI policy

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Calls for more leniency in Europe

By Jeffrey Dastin

PARIS, Feb 10 (Reuters) - World leaders and technology

executives are convening in Paris on Monday to discuss how to

safely embrace artificial intelligence at a time of mounting

resistance to heavy-handed red tape that businesses say stifles

innovation.

Eagerness to rein in AI has waned since previous AI summits

in Britain and South Korea that focused world powers' attention

on technology's risks after ChatGPT's viral launch in 2022.

As U.S. President Donald Trump tears up his predecessor's AI

guardrails to promote U.S. competitiveness, pressure has built

on EU policymakers to pursue a lighter-touch approach to AI to

help keep European firms in the tech race.

Some EU leaders, including summit host French President

Emmanuel Macron, and tech companies are hoping flexibility will

be applied to the bloc's new AI Act to help homegrown startups.

"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

in an interview published on Friday.

"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 United States, China and EU have diverged.

European lawmakers 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. Brussels is finalising an accompanying

code of practice.

Moreover, Trump's brakes-off approach has emboldened the

regulation-cautious U.S. Big Tech groups from which Europe needs

to seek investment, said British think-tank Chatham House.

Meanwhile, China's DeepSeek challenged U.S. and British AI

leadership last month by freely distributing a human-like

reasoning system, galvanizing geopolitical and industry rivals

to race faster still.

"An unpredictable global scramble to develop AI is underway,

as the U.S. turns inward and China boasts new capabilities,"

Chatham House said.

Trump is not sending the U.S. AI Safety Institute to Paris,

in a troubling sign to those hoping for global risk-based rules

governing AI.

COMPETITIVENESS

Top political leaders including U.S. Vice President JD Vance

and China's Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing will attend the summit.

Others on the attendance list are Canadian Prime Minister Justin

Trudeau and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

Macron is due to meet with Guoqing on Monday and Vance on

Tuesday, the Elysee said. The plenary session is on February 11.

Top executives such as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai

and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are slated to give talks as well.

Executives will partake in an invitation-only dinner with

political leaders on Monday.

Google Senior Vice President James Manyika said at a press

reception on Sunday that the opportunities from AI were now in

"much greater focus."

Delegations are also expected to discuss how to manage AI's

massive energy needs as the planet gets hotter, as well as AI

for the developing world. A non-binding communiqué has been in

progress.

Macron is eager to promote France's national industry, with

a focus on areas where Europe's second-largest economy has an

advantage: free, "open-source" systems, and clean energy to

power data centers.

Ahead of the summit, France struck a deal with the United

Arab Emirates for a major AI data center representing

investments of up to $50 billion.

Launching a new app with generative AI software, the CEO of

Nvidia ( NVDA )-backed French startup Mistral told Reuters: "The French

and the whole world are realising that European players count

and that they provide cutting-edge technology."