On Tuesday, the vice -president JD Vance told the European and Asian leaders in Paris that the Trump administration was adopting an aggressive approach, America for the first approach to the race to dominate all the bricks of artificial intelligence and warned the Europeans to dismantle the regulations and make it on board with Washington.
During his first foreign journey since he entered office, Vance used his opening address in a meeting at the top of the ASA hosted by France and India to describe his vision of an arrival era of American technological domination. Europe, he said, would have been forced to choose between the use of technology designed and produced by the Americans or take sides with authoritarian-unpacked competitors not very veiled to China-that would have exploited the technology to their damage.
“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful artificial intelligence systems are built in the United States with the American design and the chips manufactured,” he said, adding quickly that “only because we are the leader does not mean that we want or we have to do it alone. “
But he said that for Europe to become what he clearly provides for Junior partner, he must eliminate most of his digital regulatory structure and a large part of his police on the Internet for what his governments define disinformation.
For Mr. Vance, who is on a week tour that will bring him next to the conference on Munich’s security, the main European meeting of leaders, foreign and defense ministers and others, the speech was clearly understood as a warning shot. It largely silenced the room in a wing of the Grand Palais in the center of Paris. Leaders accustomed to talking about “guardrails” for emerging artificial intelligence applications and “fairness” to ensure that technology is available and comfortable for underground populations have not heard of any of those sentences from Mr. Vance.
He spoke only a few hours after President Trump put new rates of 25 % on foreign steel, essentially canceling commercial agreements with Europe and other regions. Mr. Vance’s speech, precisely composed and delivered with emphasis, seemed to be an indicator of the tone that Trump’s national security leaders plan to bring to Europe this week.
The defense secretary Pete Hegseth will talk about Ukraine with the European leaders on Wednesday and the secretary of state Marco Rubio will arrive in Munich when the conference will open at the end of the week. It is likely that that session is dominated by American and European competition opinions on how to negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine.
With a short background in Silicon Valley and in the risk capital, Mr. Vance is the image of a new generation of Republicans immersed in the first ideology of Mr. Trump’s America. After Vance left the room, he did not remain to listen to the European response, the United States and Great Britain refused to sign the summit pressure.
Mr. Vance started his speech with a direct reference to the AI security summit, held in Bletchley Park, the Grand Estate in Great Britain, where the Rompigiaccio broke the German enigmai codes in the Second World War. That conference ended with a terrible warning of “serious damage, even catastrophic, deliberate or involuntary, deriving from the most significant skills of these artificial intelligence models”. Twenty -eight nations, including the United States, promised to “work together inclusive to guarantee focus on man, reliable and responsible”
Mr. Vance has done everything to separate from that summit and the speech held by his predecessor, Kamala Harris. “I’m not here this morning to talk about AI security,” he said. “I have heard of talking about artificial intelligence opportunities”, warning that America’s response to the AI challenge could no longer be “self -aware” or “risk opponent”.
“The future of the AI will not be won for safety,” he said.
At a time when Trump is exchanging advice and government units that were chasing disinformation, largely from Russia, China and Iran, Vance argued that American technological companies were still facing “great regulations” in Europe.
He did not propose to demolish all these rules, but he said: “It is one thing to prevent a predator of prey on a child on the internet, and it is something very different to prevent an adult man or woman from accessing the opinions that the Government thinks is disinformation. “
Of course in Washington, this is exactly what many federal employees charge Mr. Trump, as he orders all references to gods – diversity, equity and inclusion – stripped by the government’s websites and has banned the government employees to put their pronouns their favorite their signatures.
At the same time, Mr. Vance warned how “hostile foreign opponents have armed art intelligence software to rewrite history, surveillance users and censorship speech”. But he did not explain how to monitor or remedy this problem.
European officials knew about what was coming, even if they didn’t know that Mr. Vance would be so frank. On the opening day of the conference, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, spoke of the need to simplify European regulation. He has announced over $ 100 billion of private investments in France on the AI technologies and the power to generate them. This is a huge figure for France, but a fraction of what the private sector is spending in the United States and what China and its state enterprises and startups are working.
Vance has reached the heart of a central dispute that probably expands in the next year: the European Union regulates the technological companies of the United States much more strongly.
The Law on digital services of the block, approved in 2022, aims to combat disinformation and force companies on social media to police in a more aggressive way and moderate their platforms for illicit content – or risk billion dollars in fines. The Digital Markets Act, also approved in 2022, offers European regulators a large authority to force the largest online gatekeeper to change their commercial practices, to prevent boxing giants in users and encourage greater competition.
Europe also tried to be at the forefront in the AI regulation by pushing to increase the level of supervision and trying to limit the use of technology. But with the United States and China that run in the development of the AI, Macron has urged Europe to relieve and priority to innovation compared to regulation.
Brussels regulators targeted US technological companies with multiple investigations and fines. Apple and Google have faced billions of fines on issues such as unpaid taxes and preferential care in the search results. Meta has been accused of violating the rules of European competition and of having insufficient guarantees to combat electoral disinformation. Last month, the regulators opened an X -out investigation on the spread of illegal content.
The United States claimed that the European approach is unjustly addressed to the titans of American technology. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief of Meta, invited Mr. Trump to defend US technological societies from what he defined the European “censorship” and to ask that the European Union stops fining them.
“We will work with President Trump to reject governments from all over the world who are going against American companies,” Zuckerberg said last month, shortly after announcing that Meta could end his business control program.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, who spoke on Tuesday immediately after Mr. Vance, did not face his predecessor forcefully – who had already left the room. Echo to Mr. Macron, she herself recognized that “we have to make it simpler and we have to cut the bureaucracy and we will do it”.
“Too often I have heard that Europe is late for the race, that the United States and China have already gone on,” he said. “I disagree. The race Ai is far from being over.” Mrs. Von der Leyen said that Europe aimed to invest $ 200 billion in the coming years.
But he also defended the regulatory approach of the European Union and suggested that there was a “distinct European brand of artificial intelligence” which focused on “complex applications”, which was cooperative and which embraced an open source approach, which means that The underlying software is widely shared.
“Yes, he needs competition,” he said. “But the IA also needs collaboration. And the ia needs people’s trust and must be safe. “
Liz Aldman AND Aurelien Breeden Reports contributed by the SI summit in Paris.