European politicians are coming under pressure to relax guardrails put on artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help Europe make up ground it has lost to the United States and China in the global race to dominate the sector.
World leaders and tech executives are gathering in Paris on Monday for a two-day summit on AI, organised by French president Emmanuel Macron.
The summit is taking place at a time of significant disruption in the rapidly expanding industry, due to the emergence of Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek as a competitor to software developed by US tech giants, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The Paris summit will be attended by senior executives from Microsoft, Signal, OpenAI, and Facebook owner Meta. Taoiseach Micheál Martin will travel to the summit for a meeting of national leaders on Tuesday, which will include US vice-president JD Vance.
The summit is expected to discuss the potential for closer global co-operation on the fast-changing technology.
One French official involved in organising the summit said the artificial intelligence race was far from settled. “There is a lot of room still to develop AI, if you have talent, if you have some computing power and if you have start-ups and teams willing to act quickly. We have all this in Europe,” the source said.
Are we at the beginning of Donald Trump’s global trade war?
The Élysée official said the aim of the summit was to show that “AI doesn’t belong to only two countries in the world”.
“There is a desire from some of the players to convey this message that it is game over. The recent announcement and news in China shows this is not the case,” they said.
However, Europe will not catch up with the United States and China if it doesn’t reduce regulation of artificial intelligence, according to Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, head of Digital Europe, an industry body representing the tech sector.
Last March the EU passed a landmark law, the AI Act, to regulate the technology. The legislation bans the use of artificial intelligence to scrape CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. It also puts in place requirements for greater oversight of the use of AI in “high-risk” settings, such as healthcare, banking, education and policing.
Ms Bonefeld-Dahl said Europe had lost out on the “digital revolution” of the early 2000s and was at risk of missing the boat on artificial intelligence as well.
Rather than focusing on regulations, the European Union should be looking at how it could jump on the “wagon”, she said. “It is really a time where we should say, how can we remove all unnecessary burden from companies?” she said.
Speaking in advance of the summit, Ms Bonefeld-Dahl said the EU could pick certain sectors, like energy infrastructure or healthcare, where it could lead the way on introducing AI.
That could include lucrative subsidies for companies using artificial intelligence tech in the energy grid sector, or tax incentives to coax skilled engineers and “green tech” talent to Europe, she said.
“I can tell you consumers in Europe are, I would say, nearly overprotected to the degree that the latest technologies will not benefit them, which is not what we want,” she said.
A spokesman for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm that proposes laws, said the artificial intelligence race was “far from over” and Europe was well positioned to “lead in trustworthy AI”.
EU officials are working on plans to set up “AI factories”, where European start-ups will be able to access high-powered computers to test and train new technology and software, he said.
- Sign up for the Business Today newsletter and get the latest business news and commentary in your inbox every weekday morning
- Opt in to Business push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Our Inside Business podcast is published weekly – Find the latest episode here
