Good Morning,
You can tell a lot about the Trump administration’s stance on AI by JD Vance’s speech in Paris this week. For Europe, I have to say it’s very troubling.
The US and the UK have refused to sign a declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence at a landmark Paris summit.
To add insult to injury for AI regulation, JD Vance’s speech was comically authoritarian. I found many aspects of his speech troubling.
The U.S. has completely devalued Europe’s contribution to the debate. What this “opportunistic” approach actually does is reinforce the idea that the winners of the technology will frame how it is to be regulated, i.e. only the U.S. and possibly one day, China.
Worth a Listen
Fox News tries to make Vance look like a champion of American values, but he comes across as something else. If you want to understand the Trump’s administration on Generative AI leadership, this is the best way to do it.
15 minutes, 42 seconds.
“I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago. I'm here to talk about AI opportunity.”
America are the incumbents and they want no interference, least of all from European values.
As far as the U.S. democratizing AI there is a very clear message here. Vice President JD Vance delivered an unmistakable message: the United States under the 47th president has room for you on the Trump train — but it also has no problem leaving you behind. It’s like listening to a Peter Thiel messenger. J.D. Vance has ties to Peter Thiel that endears him to the PayPal mafia and Trump.
American opportunism in AI doesn’t need Europe, apparently. (which of course we already knew).
The European Union says it will channel €200 billion (about $206 billion) into artificial intelligence investments in a bid to compete with the US and China. At the AI Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the bloc would spend €50 billion (about $51 billion) to top up €150 billion (about $154 billion) in funding already pledged by a collective of private investors called the European AI Champions Initiative. Meanwhile outside of Mistral, that’s mostly an open-weigt model company, Europe doesn’t have many good LLM builders or makers. Mistral isn’t even the “DeepSeek of Europe”, it’s a few tiers down and is mostly a spin-off of former Meta employees.
Read this carefully, the devil is in the details and the meaning between the lines is very U.S. centric above all else!
Transcript of JD Vance Speech
“I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago. I'm here to talk about AI opportunity. When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting edge technology, oftentimes, I think our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite.
Our administration, the Trump administration, believes that AI will have countless revolutionary applications in economic innovation, job creation, national security, health care, free expression and beyond, and to restrict its development now would not only unfairly benefit incumbents in the space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations. Now with that in mind, I'd like to make four main points today.
Number one, this administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide, and we are the partner of choice for others foreign countries, and certainly businesses, as they expand their own use of AI.
Number two, we believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off, and we'll make every effort to encourage pro growth AI policies. And I like to see that the de-regulatory flavor making its way into a lot of the conversations this conference.
Number three, we feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias, and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship. And finally, number four, the Trump administration will maintain a pro worker growth path for AI, so it can be a potent tool for job creation in the United States. And I appreciate Prime Minister Modi's point. AI, I really believe will facilitate and make people more productive. It is not going to replace human beings. It will never replace human beings. And I think too many of the leaders in the AI industry, when they talk about this fear of replacing workers, I think they really missed the point.
Ai, we believe is going to make us more productive, more prosperous and more free. The United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way. The US possesses all components across the full AI stack, including advanced semiconductor design, Frontier algorithms and, of course, transformational applications.
Now the computing power this stack requires is integral to advancing AI technology, and to safeguard America's advantage, the Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful AI systems are built in the US with American designed and manufactured chips. Now, just because we're the leader doesn't mean we want to or need to go it alone, of course. And let me be emphatic about this point, America wants to partner with all of you.
We want to embark on the AI revolution before us with the spirit of openness and collaboration. But to create that kind of trust, we need international regulatory regimes that fosters the creation of AI technology rather than strangles it. And we need our European friends in particular to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation. Now, the development of cutting edge AI in the US is no accident.
By preserving an open regulatory environment, we've encouraged American innovators to experiment and to make unparalleled R and D investments of the $700 billion give or take, that's estimated to be spent on AI in 2028 over half of it will likely be invested in the United States of America.
Now, this administration will not be the one to snuff out the startups and the grad students producing some of the most ground breaking applications of artificial intelligence. Instead, our laws will keep big tech, little tech, and all other developers on a level playing field. Now, with the President's recent executive order on AI, we're developing an AI action plan that avoids an overly precautionary regulatory regime while ensuring that all Americans benefit from the technology and its transformative potential. And we invite your countries to work with us and to follow that model if it makes sense for your nation.
However, the Trump administration is troubled by reports that some foreign governments are considering tightening the screws on U.S. tech companies with international footprints. Now, America cannot and will not accept that, and we think it's a terrible mistake, not just for the United States of America, but for your own countries.
The US innovators of all sizes already know what it's like to deal with onerous international rules. Many of our most productive tech companies are forced to deal with the EU's Digital Services Act and the massive regulations it created about taking down content and policing so-called misinformation. And of course, we want to ensure the Internet is a safe place, but it is one thing to prevent a predator from preying on a child on the internet, and it is something quite different, to prevent a grown man or woman from accessing an opinion that the government thinks is misinformation.
Meanwhile, for smaller firms, navigating the GDPR means paying endless legal compliance costs or otherwise risking massive fines. Now for some the easiest way to avoid the dilemma has been to simply block EU users in the first place. Is this really the future that we want? Ladies and gentlemen, I think the answer for all of us should be no.
There's no issue where we worry about more than regulation when it comes to energy. Again, I appreciated the comments of so many at the conference, because they recognize that we stand now at the frontier of an AI industry that is hungry for reliable power and high quality semiconductors, yet too many of our friends are de-industrializing, on the one hand, and chasing reliable power out of their nations and off their grids with the other.
The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. It will be won by building from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future. Now at a personal level, what excites me most about AI is that it is grounded in the real and the physical economy.
The success of the sector isn't just a matter of smart people sitting in front of a computer screen and coding. It depends on those who work with their hands. Even as robotics will change our factories, it will certainly make our healthcare providers better at treating diseases, but it will also depend on the data produced by those healthcare providers, by those doctors and nurses.
I believe it will help us create and store new modes of power in the future, but right now, AI cannot take off unless the world builds the energy infrastructure to support it. Now it's my view that tech innovation over the last 20 years has often conjured images of smart people staring at computer screens engineering in the world of bits, but the AI economy will primarily depend on and transform the world of atoms.
Now, at this moment, we face the extraordinary prospect of a new industrial revolution, one on par with the invention of the steam engine or Bessemer steel. But it will never come to pass, if over regulation deters innovators from taking the risks necessary to advance the ball, nor will it occur if we allow AI to become dominated by massive players looking to use the tech to censor or control users’ thoughts. And I'd ask if you step back a moment and ask yourself, Who is most aggressively demanding that we meaning political leaders gathered here today, do the most aggressive regulation, it is very often the people who already have an incumbent advantage in the market.
And when a massive incumbent comes to us asking us for safety regulations, we ought to ask whether that safety regulation is for the benefit of our people or whether it's for the benefit of the incumbent. Now over the last few years, we've watched as governments, businesses and nonprofit organizations have advanced unpopular and I believe, down right, ahistorical social agendas through AI.
In the US. We had AI image generators trying to tell us that George Washington was black, or that America's doughboys in World War One were, in fact, women. Now we laugh at this now, and of course, it was ridiculous, but we have to remember the lessons from that ridiculous moment, and what we take from it is that 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. We can trust our people to think, to consume information, to develop their own ideas and to debate with one another in the open marketplace of ideas.
Now we've also watched as hostile foreign adversaries have weaponized AI software to rewrite history, surveil users, and censor speech. This is hardly new, of course, as they do with other tech, some authoritarian regimes have stolen and used AI to strengthen their military, intelligence, and surveillance capabilities, capture foreign data, and create propaganda to undermine other nations’ national security. I want to be clear: this administration will block such efforts full stop.
We will safeguard American AI and Chip technologies from theft and misuse, work with our allies and partners to strengthen and extend these protections and close pathways to adversaries attaining Ai capabilities that threaten all of our people. And I would also remind our international friends here today that partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.
From CCTV to 5G equipment, we're all familiar with cheap tech in the marketplace that's been heavily subsidized and exported by authoritarian regimes. But as I know, and I think some of this, some of us in this room have learned from experience. Partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. Finally, this administration wants to be very clear about one last point, we will always center American workers in our AI policy.
We refuse to view AI as a purely disruptive technology that will inevitably automate away our labor force. We believe and we will fight for policies that ensure that AI is going to make our workers more productive, and we expect that they will reap the rewards with higher wages, better benefits, and safer and more prosperous communities.
From law to medicine, manufacturing, the most immediate applications of AI, almost all involve supplementing, not replacing, the work being done by Americans. Now, combined with this administration's worker first approach to immigration, we believe that the US labor force prepared to use AI to its fullest extent will instead attract the attention of businesses that have offshored some of these roles.
To accomplish this, the administration will make sure that America has the best trained workforce in the world. Our schools will teach students how to manage, how to supervise, and how to interact with AI-enabled tools as they become more and more a part of our everyday lives. And, as AI creates new jobs and industries, our government, businesses and labor organizations have an obligation to work together to empower the workers, not just of the United States, but all over the country, all over the world.
To that end for all major AI policy decisions coming from the federal government, the Trump administration will guarantee American workers a seat at the table, and we're very proud of that. Now I've taken up enough of your time, so I'd like to close with just a quick story. This is a beautiful country, President Macron, and I know that you're proud of it, and should be. And yesterday, as I was touring Les Invalides with General Gravette with my three kids.
He was kind enough to show me the sword that belonged to America's dearest international friend from our own revolution, of course, the Marquis de Lafayette. He let me hold the sword, but of course he made me put on the white gloves beforehand. And it got me thinking of this country, France, and of course of my own country and of the beautiful civilization that we have built together with weapons like that Saber.
Weapons that are dangerous in the wrong hands but are incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in the right hands. I couldn't help but think of the conference today if we choose the wrong approach on other things that could be conceived of as dangerous, things like AI, and choose to hold ourselves back, it will alter not only our GDP or the stock market, but the very future of the project that Lafayette and the American founders set off to create.
This doesn't mean, of course, all concerns about safety go out the window, but focus matters, and we must focus now on the opportunity to catch lightning in a bottle, unleash our most brilliant innovators and use AI to improve the well being of our nations and their peoples. With great confidence, I can say it is an opportunity that the Trump administration will not squander. And we hope everyone convene here today feels exactly the same. Thank you, and God bless you all.”
The next decade of U.S. exceptionalism in AI is clearly going to be messy. Even as Europe and the Middle East try to build AI datacenters to keep up.
Trump is making the EU look incompetent with this move:
“We want Europe to be one of the leading AI continents, and this means embracing a way of life where AI is everywhere,” said Von der Leyen.
In his speech, Vance adopted an 'America First' stance, asserting that U.S. AI policy must prioritize American workers and promote an environment conducive to technological advancement.
The problem is of course there’s no evidence that promoting OpenAI and Anthorpic to “duopoly” status as model makers is particularly good for actual innovations, just more products. Former employees of OpenAI and Google are now making “AGI” like startups with huge valuations without real products. There’s no evidence the U.S. is an actual promoter of the technology for civilization’s betterment, mostly the U.S. economic agenda where scaling laws and huge AI datacenters price out most other global competitors.
Vance’s speech puts down Europe and promotes America.
JD Vance, in his keynote address at the Paris AI Summit, emphasized several critical points regarding the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and its regulation. Primarily, he articulated a staunch opposition to what he termed 'excessive' regulations on AI, particularly targeting European regulatory approaches.
He also pressed European nations to step back from “excessive regulation” of the AI sector that he said “could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off.” Even as Silicon Valley legacy firms are hegemonies in the Cloud, global digital advertising, E-commerce, Search and now Chatbots.
Of course this is all concerning for Western allies to America. The U.S. appears even more willing to cut corners to channel the distribution of wealth to their companies and their technologies.
Furthermore, he called for collaborative partnerships between the U.S. and its allies, focusing on fostering innovation without succumbing to regulatory pressures. But what kind of a “partnership” would it be given the U.S. existent AI Supremacy and refuel to have rela competition? J.D. Vance’s speech is in fact, a new vision for America and AI.
If anything, it sets the stage for a breakdown of relations between the U.S. and its BigTech firms with Europe, the Global South, India, East Asia and China. Countries that submit to its agenda become a bit like AI vassal states as we are seeing with Israel, Japan, Taiwan, the U.K, and other nations.
In the U.S. media there was surprising little coverage of his talk I have noticed. But all that he said actually matters to what the U.S. will do and how it will conduct itself in this Presidential term among the most pivotal in the history of AI that we have witnessed in our lifetimes.
People on the right on X said it was a great speech. There are of course good reasons why Europeans and France, Germany and others look upon U.S. AI with trepidation and concern and it’s not only the existential risks. It’s the economic risks and decades of control it entails. It’s the division with China too, forcing Europe and the Middle East into being between its two biggest economic trading partners. China too is important for Europe’s and the Middle East’s economic well-being.
X Parrots JD Vance’s Speech and its Talking Points
AI with characteristics of American exceptionalism is certainly a new agenda it appears:
In addition to opposing excessive regulation, Vance specifically highlighted the necessity for the Trump administration to ensure that AI systems developed in America are devoid of ideological bias. He emphasized that a controlled and balanced regulatory approach is required to not only foster innovation but also protect the integrity and fairness of AI systems.
Yet another outside of the U.S. knows full well there is no such thing as “fairness” when it comes to BigTech and the rules of monopoly capitalism that have become more sinister in recent years. The quote about being devoid of “ideological bias” is particularly funny considering Trump being the most biased POTUS with rigid (and outdated) opinions in recent memory.
Sam Altman’s emphasis on AGI is all about replacing the tasks people do! There is literally no alignment with people or workers in OpenAI’s products. They seek to invent a hypothetical technology (in AGI) that will disrupt the workforce with AI systems as and more capable than human experts.
J.D. Vance’s speech is not very grounded in reality, and was clearly just written by some ghost writer littered with Trump-friendly talking points. His speech wasn’t even representative of American or democratic values. Especially since American capitalism is now dominated by monopoly corporations and the startups they choose to be the winners of the next generation.
The EU was one of the first global powers to introduce comprehensive regulations around artificial intelligence, ushering the AI Act into force last year. Now America has outright reject it and all that European AI risk mitigation stands for. This will mean any serious global regulation on AI will be stunted for years and perhaps decades to come.
The slow pace of BigTech’s Generative AI efforts are anything but catching lightning out of a bottle. They aren’t iterating on their models like younger more agile startups even with all their funding and totally made-up valuations. DeepSeek was founded in 2023 and had a model with better cost to performance than Google.
Neither does Europe have the companies or startups to compete with either China or America. Which makes their potential investment in datacenters, ever the more absurd. They don’t have the same access to AI talent, that can easily be lured by more money to the U.S.
J.D. Vance’s speech reminds of how undemocratic access to AI currently is and will likely continue to be. Sovereign AI is mostly a myth, irrespective of what Nvidia says to drive AI chip sales. Sending JD Vance to ruin the momentum of the Paris Summit has to be one of the least inclusive things Trump could have possible accomplished for the future of AI. Europe now will fully realize the danger U.S. exceptionalism in AI represents.
“We want Europe to be one of the leading AI continents, and this means embracing a way of life where AI is everywhere,” said Von der Leyen. “Too often I hear that Europe is late to the race where the United States or China have already gotten ahead. I disagree, because the AI race is far from being over.”
Europe has no leverage either in National security or AI because they have been too permissive with the U.S. for decades. Somehow they only woke up to this fact in 2025 as their economies are struggling. Germany will be decimated in the automobile industry with China’s rise in EVs and Tesla’s aggressive practices. The German economy is currently considered to be in a "bad" state, experiencing a period of significant decline with forecasts showing contraction in GDP for consecutive years, largely attributed to weak domestic and foreign demand for manufactured goods, alongside high uncertainty impacting investment; this is considered a "serious" situation for Europe's largest economy.
I don’t have to remind you that Germany is anything but a global leader in AI. Europe’s most successful companies remain anomalies like ASML, SAP, Siemens or Spotify. Neither is their Venture capital or startups system functioning well. Nor do they support entrepreneurship or risk-taking adequately even in some of the industries that matter the most to their economic future.
That the U.S. didn’t sign the Paris Summit means Europe is on its own as a technological backwater. It means Trump views them as so weak, they are not even worth partnering with. In this context, the rants of French President Emmanuel Macron make even less sense.
The EU was one of the first global powers to introduce comprehensive regulations around artificial intelligence. But it is not actually a “global power” in AI in any shape or form in the only aspect that truly matters, the commercial aspect. The U.S. will continue to poach their talent, with few to little consequences. Just like they are doing in India, China and other places for their economic benefits.
Apple Intelligence isn't available in the EU yet because of compliance issues. I find this surprising. A company this big is surely aware of regulatory requirements in all their markets. But still they pushed out a product that is non compliant on the EU market. Btw, EU is Apple's second largest market contributing approximately 26% of Apple’s total quarterly revenue in Q4 2024. So what did they imagine, that the Eu would just put aside their regulation for Apple?
Anyway, I hope the EU stands its ground on this as these rules and regulations are meant to protect the people. I don't see why it's such a hassle for US companies to comply. The EU may not be this AI powerhouse but it's still a bug market and if they want to enter it, they should comply. Simple as that.
Liberal much? Unsubscribing!