5 Notes from the Big Paris A.I. Summit

World leaders, tech moguls and assorted hangers-on (including yours truly) are gathered in Paris this week for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, a conference co-hosted by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, to discuss a host of A.I.-related issues.

The leaders of three American A.I. companies — Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind — are here, as are a flock of prominent A.I. leaders, academic researchers and civil society groups. (Vice President JD Vance, who is leading the U.S. delegation, is expected to appear on Tuesday.)

Between bites of pain au chocolat, here’s some of what I’m seeing so far:

Europe is having regulation regrets.

The backdrop for the A.I. summit is that Europe — which passed tough laws on data privacy and social media over the last decade, and had a head start on regulating A.I. with the European Union’s A.I. Act — appears to be having second thoughts.

Mr. Macron, who this week announced $112.5 billion in private investments into the French A.I. ecosystem, has been especially wary of falling behind. He has become a cheerleader for Mistral, a French A.I. start-up, and has argued against “punitive” regulation that could make the country’s tech sector less competitive.

Tech companies (and their lobbyists) appreciate the assist. But it’s probably too late to stop the A.I. Act, which is slated to take effect in stages over the next year. And several American A.I. executives told me they still considered Europe a hard place to do business compared with other big markets, such as India, where regulation is comparatively lax.

A.I. doomsayers are losing ground.

The Paris A.I. summit is actually the third in a series of global A.I. summits. The first two — held in Britain in 2023 and in South Korea last year — were much more focused on the potential risks and harms of advanced A.I. systems, up to and including human extinction.