The AI ‘Action’ Summit hosted by President Macron in Paris offered a rare moment of political clarity. U.S. Vice President JD Vance confirmed that President Donald Trump is the new sheriff in town and that the stifling, safety-first rules favoured in Brussels represent an untenable threat to technological innovation.
When Vance stated that “excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off,” he wasn’t only complaining that European regulations impose an unfair burden on American companies. He also highlighted the cultural chasm between the forward-looking U.S. and the risk-averse EU.
When it comes to innovative tech, Silicon Valley builds while Brussels bans. The EU has arrogantly believed that regulating other people’s technology, rather than creating its own, could give it a role on the global stage. It has used the Digital Markets Act to regulate digital competition and the Digital Services Act to police content, which has targeted U.S. tech companies, including Meta Platforms, Elon Musk’s X, and Apple, for alleged violations that could cost them billions of euros in fines.
The EU’s obsession with regulation, particularly the Artificial Intelligence Act, has not fostered European growth. When this Act was passed in 2023, the European political elite congratulated themselves on “the world’s first comprehensive AI law” without seeming to worry that they had no significant AI sector to regulate. As the report I wrote at the time pointed out, “referees don’t win football matches.”
But Vance went a few steps further. The excessive focus on safety and regulation was, in his words, “a terrible mistake, not just for the United States of America, but for your own countries.” He continued that the AI revolution won’t occur “if we allow AI to become dominated by massive players looking to use the tech to censor or control users’ thoughts.”
Ironically, this is the one area where the EU’s trepidation about AI has not been applied: they have happily demanded that U.S. Big Tech companies deploy AI algorithms to detect and take down ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ online. Unlike the EU, Vance stressed, the ‘Trump administration will ensure that AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias and never restrict our citizens’ right to free speech.”
Vance also took veiled shots at AI rival China. But his claim that “authoritarian regimes” are using stolen AI tools to “capture foreign data and create propaganda,” which he claimed the U.S. would block, also sounded like a warning to Europe. This might seem a bit rich coming from a U.S. vice president who represents Big Tech social media companies that have been doing precisely this since their inception: providing free services to harvest user data upon which billions have been made in advertising. U.S. Big Tech is just as unaccountable as Chinese ones.
But Vance’s point was also a warning that the EU should not harbour illusions about there being an easy way in which Brussels might enter the geopolitical struggle over the future of AI.
This relates to DeepSeek, a Chinese start-up company born in 2023 in Hangzhou. The (exaggerated) claim that it has built an Artificial Intelligence model at a fraction of the cost of those of the current industry leaders such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT shook the tech world. Shares in Silicon Valley’s Nvidia, which makes most of the chips used by AI, fell by 17%. Moreover, the fact that DeepSeek had found ways of getting hold of Nvidia chips despite longstanding Washington embargoes on militarily useful U.S. technologies going to China was, as Trump described it, “a wake-up call for American AI firms.”
For EU leaders, DeepSeek has held out some hope. Despite being far behind, it has fuelled the belief that Europe still has room to join the AI revolution and carve a niche out of the unfolding global new order. This is the thread EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen clung to when she responded to Vance’s challenge. “Too often, I hear that Europe is late to the race—while the U.S. and China have already gotten ahead. I disagree. Because the AI race is far from over. Truth is, we are only at the beginning.”
To underline her optimism, she mentioned the EU had invested €10 billion in 12 AI factories, which she claimed is the “largest public investment for AI in the world.” She even announced “AI Gigafactories”, which are massive data and computing infrastructure, to be made available to researchers and entrepreneurs seeking to build AI companies and services. The aim, in total, is to invest €200 billion in AI in Europe. Even before the Summit, President Macron unveiled plans for raising €109 billion for such investments in France.
But will Vance’s challenge be heeded? The signs are not favourable. The Action Summit’s Declaration, which the U.S. (and the UK) declined to sign, could have been written by the pre-Trump Biden woke-ocracy. It called for “respect of international laws including humanitarian law and human-rights law and the protection of human rights, gender equality, linguistic diversity, protection of consumers and intellectual property rights.”
The EU remains wedded to its past. The precautionary, risk-averse culture is not skin deep. All of Brussels’s AI investment carrots are sticks geared towards enforcing their safety-first, regulate-everything mindset.
Europe needs more than press releases and announcements and promises of investment. It needs a change of mindset to remove all the national and federal barriers that continue to hold European innovation back: from removing the onerous costs of regulatory compliance to enabling a culture of experimentation and entrepreneurship that once existed in Europe. Von der Leyen promised to reduce red tape. New European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkkunen, promised to reexamine how the AI Act can be relaxed. But what is needed is scrapping it altogether.
