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AI Action Summit to focus on open-source tech and clean

energy

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Global consensus on AI principles sought, not new

regulation

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Top CEOs including from Google, OpenAI to attend

By Jeffrey Dastin and Elizabeth Pineau

PARIS, Feb 5 (Reuters) - All eyes are on the French

capital next week to see if U.S. President Donald Trump's

administration can find common ground with China and nearly 100

other nations on the safe development of artificial

intelligence.

About a year after world powers reckoned with the dangers of

AI in England's Bletchley Park, a wider array of countries are

gathering in Paris to discuss putting the technology to work.

France, eager to promote its national industry, is hosting

the AI Action Summit alongside India on Feb. 10 and 11, with a

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

advantage: freely available or "open-source" systems, and clean

energy to power data centers.

Mitigating labor disruption and promoting sovereignty in a

global AI market are also on the agenda.

Top executives from Alphabet, Microsoft ( MSFT )

and dozens of other businesses are slated to attend. Government

leaders are expected to dine on Monday with select CEOs. And

talks will include one on Tuesday by Sam Altman, chief executive

of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, two people involved in the

summit told Reuters.

It was less clear whether the U.S. will reach consensus with

other nations on AI.

Since taking office on Jan. 20, President Trump has revoked

former President Joe Biden's 2023 executive order on the

technology, set in motion a repeat withdrawal from the Paris

Climate Agreement and faced Congressional calls to consider new

export controls on AI chips to counter rival China.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance will attend for the American

delegation.

A non-binding communiqué of principles for the stewardship

of AI, bearing U.S., Chinese and other signatures, has been

under negotiation and would mark a big achievement if reached,

said the people involved in the summit, who spoke on condition

of anonymity.

They declined to detail the communiqué or elaborate if there

were any points of disagreement among the would-be signatories.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

An official for the French presidency said the summit will

give voice to countries around the world, not only the U.S. and

China.

"We are showing that AI is here, that companies must adopt

it, that it is a vector of competitiveness for France and for

Europe," the Élysée official said.

NO NEW AI REGULATION

Safety commitments dominated the conversation in prior

global AI summits in Bletchley Park and Seoul. In Paris,

creating new regulation is not on the agenda.

Reeling from red tape and a reputation for risk aversion,

Europe and particularly France are eager to discuss frameworks

for AI policy but not rules that could slow down their national

champions, which have lagged American companies. Countries like

France are evaluating how to implement the EU AI Act in as

flexible a way as possible so it does not discourage innovation,

the people involved in the summit said.

Instead in focus is how to distribute AI's benefits to

developing nations, via cheaper models made by the likes of

France's startup Mistral and China's DeepSeek. The

Hangzhou-based company rocked global markets last month by

showing it could vie with U.S. heavyweights on human-like

reasoning technology, while charging much less.

France has seized on the development as evidence that the

global race to more powerful AI remains wide open.

One of the summit's likely outcomes is that philanthropies

and businesses are expected to commit an initial $500 million in

capital, going up to $2.5 billion over five years, to fund

public-interest projects on AI around the world, the people

said.

Another is addressing the energy crunch that industry thinks

is inevitable from their power-hungry AI models. A major

producer of clean energy in the form of nuclear power, France

wants to reconcile the world's climate and AI ambitions.

France's decarbonized energy and "nuclear fleet, in the

context of data center installations, is an asset," the Élysée

official said. "We will most likely have announcements in this

regard at the summit."