US vice-president JD Vance has warned Europe not to adopt “overly precautionary” regulations on artificial intelligence as the US and the UK refused to join dozens of other countries in signing a declaration to ensure that the technology is “safe, secure and trustworthy”.
The two countries held back from signing the communique agreed by about 60 countries at the AI Action summit in Paris on Tuesday as Vance vowed that the US would remain the dominant force in the technology.
“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful AI systems are built in the US, with American-designed and manufactured chips,” Vance told an audience of world leaders and tech executives at the summit.
“America wants to partner with all of you . . . but to create that kind of trust, we need international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technology rather than strangle it.”
The summit declaration calls for “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all”.
While the commitments are non-binding, both the US and UK had signed similar declarations at previous iterations of the AI summit.
In addition to the new US administration’s “America First” objections to the communique, one person close to the British government suggested the wording was “too restrictive”.
The harder US stance comes as competition is heating up with China on developments around AI: chip manufacturing, so-called foundational models and AI chatbots, and the energy needed to power supercomputers.
The recent arrival of a new cut-price AI model from DeepSeek, a little-known Chinese research lab, shocked Silicon Valley groups such as OpenAI, which thought they had a commanding advantage.
Meanwhile, Europe is seeking a foothold in the AI industry to avoid becoming too reliant on the US or China. At the two-day summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, European leaders and companies unveiled about €200bn of planned investments in data centres and computing clusters to underpin the region’s AI efforts.
On Tuesday, Vance told the assembled leaders the US would not relinquish its lead in AI, while also warning countries not to sign AI deals with “authoritarian regimes”, in a thinly veiled jab against China.
“Partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure,” Vance said, referring to CCTV and 5G as previous examples where “cheap tech . . . [was] heavily subsidised and exported by authoritarian regimes”.
Among the priorities set out in the joint declaration signed by countries including China, India and Germany was “reinforcing international co-operation to promote co-ordination in international governance”.
Such language put off the US, which did not agree on the terminology around multilateralism and international collaboration, said an official from one of the countries that signed the document.
The US also had concerns that Current AI, the foundation launched by France during the summit, would be used to funnel money to French-speaking countries, the official said.
Vance’s speech was “a 180-degree turnaround from what we saw with the Biden administration”, said Keegan McBride, a lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute, who studies the geopolitics of AI.
The narrative around Macron’s summit was about pushing alternatives to the US-led drive to develop AI technologies. Following the launch of powerful open models from DeepSeek, Europeans had felt like they had a fleeting chance to compete in AI, said Frederike Kaltheuner, senior EU and global governance lead at the AI Now Institute, an AI research institute.
“Vance just dumped water all over that. [It] was like, ‘Yeah, that’s cute. But guess what? You know you’re actually not the ones who are making the calls here. It’s us.’” said McBride.
Additional reporting by Jim Pickard