World leaders are gathering in Paris on February 10 for the AI Action Summit, as concern grows about how to develop regulatory oversight of artificial intelligence. The two-day summit follows the AI Safety Summit held in Britain in Bletchley Park in 2023 and a smaller meeting in Seoul in 2024. Bletchley focused on the debate surrounding the ‘doomsday’ risks posed by AI, and resulted in all 25 states, including the United States and China, signing the Bletchley Declaration on AI Safety.
Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister at the time, described the declaration as ‘a landmark achievement that sees the world’s greatest AI powers agree on the urgency behind understanding the risks of AI’. At the next summit in Seoul last May, 16 leading AI companies made voluntary commitments to safely and transparently develop AI.
Democratizing AI
The Paris summit is the initiative of President Emmanuel Macron and, as its name suggests, marks a shift in focus, with a wider agenda including global AI governance, innovation and public interest.
According to Katja Bego, senior research fellow, International Security Programme, Chatham, House: ‘Paris is about democratizing AI. The organizers want to address the hyper-concentration of power in the AI market and allow more countries to benefit and shape the technology’s development,’ she said.
But those states, experts and civil society groups who are calling on the private sector to go beyond the voluntary commitments made at previous summits will meet resistance in Paris, Bego added. ‘By putting more contentious topics such as copyright and market concentration on the agenda, the organizers will find it more challenging to get meaningful commitments from the private sector,’ she said.
Despite growing investments by countries into their national AI infrastructures – notably in the US, Sweden, Singapore and Switzerland – AI development is industry-led. The four corporations investing in it the most – Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta – are predicted to spend more than $20 billion on the technology this year, up more than 40 per cent from 2023. In Europe, they have lobbied against regulation warning it may hamstring AI’s commercial development there, and in some cases have delayed putting products into European markets, citing regulatory concerns.
Race between China and the US
Analysts say this is important for Europe because the development of powerful AI is increasingly perceived as a race between the industries of America and China. In his widely cited report on the challenges to Europe’s economy, Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, highlighted red tape and laws that prevent the technology sector from competing with America and China.
To address this, the Paris summit will need to balance a commitment to cultivating a technological environment in line with European values with the urgent need for innovation and investment. ‘Europe needs a constructive vision for this technology so that it can build its own AI industries and reap the benefits as much as worry about the harms,’ said Alex Krasodomski, director of the Digital Society Programme, Chatham House.
In his view, to advance the interests of Europe the Paris summit may have to closely involve the American technology giants because only they have the funds to invest at scale. ‘Rather than an AI governance agreement, I think what’s more likely to be announced is major investments in European countries – both by states and by big American companies,’ Krasodomski added.