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Feb. 10 (UPI) — Vice President JD Vance traveled to Paris on Monday to attend a global AI Action summit on his first trip overseas since taking office last month.
Vance arrived with his family, including his wife and two children.
The AI summit, which runs Monday and Tuesday, will draw world leaders, top tech executives and policymakers where they will tackle five themes: public interest AI, jobs, investment, ethics, regulation.
Tech heavyweights Sam Altman of OpenAI, Microsoft President Brad Smith and Google CEO Sundar Pichai joined European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Canada’s outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a $112.6 billion investment in his nation’s artificial intelligence sector ahead of the gathering at the Grand Palais.
The White House said last week that Vance will attend a series of conferences on technology and international security in Europe as part of his first foreign trip as vice president.
Last week, Google ended its pledge to not use artificial intelligence for weapons development and surveillance.
It coincides as the fallout continued over the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, a development that has rapidly grown in popularity but already is banned in Italy over lingering privacy concerns.
President Donald Trump announced on the day after his inauguration that Oracle, Softbank and OpenAI would launch a joint venture to invest $500 billion in private funding to boost U.S. AI infrastructure.
During his first administration, the president signed a number of AI-related executive orders. He revoked government policies that “act as barriers to American AI innovation.” The order didn’t list those policies.
Biden’s executive order “established unnecessarily burdensome requirements for companies developing and deploying AI that would stifle private sector innovation and threaten American technological leadership.”
The order said “American development of AI systems must be free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”
Trump signed in February 2019 the American AI Initiative order to double AI research investment and created the first set of national AI research institutes. It also included a plan for AI technical standards by establishing guidance for the federal government’s use of AI, and was joined by a December 2020 order which further promoted the use of trustworthy AI in the federal government.
After Paris, Vance will then travel to Germany for the Munich Security Conference from Friday through Sunday to discuss the potential threats of technology.
The Munich trip will mark the first time the Trump administration has come face-to-face with European leaders since it started resetting priorities toward U.S. allies.