Vice President JD Vance participated in his first international trip since he was sworn into office last month, attending the 2025 Artificial Intelligence Action Summit.
The gathering will take place on Feb. 10 and 11 at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. It is the vice president’s first of several high-profile meetings with foreign leaders this week.
After the summit, Vance will travel to Germany for the Munich Security Conference, where he is expected to call on NATO members to increase their financial support to Ukraine as it continues the war against Russia.
Vance is expected to meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky while in Europe.
Vance began his speech by stressing the importance of opportunity with artificial intelligence and how it will reshape the future.
“I’m not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago,” Vance said. “I’m here to talk about AI opportunity.”
He elaborated on the Trump administration’s vision regarding AI and commented on the numerous benefits the technology would bring, calling it “one of the most promising technologies” developed in years.
“When conferences like this convene to discuss cutting-edge technology, oftentimes, I think, our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse,” Vance said. “But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that calls us to do precisely the opposite.”
“Now our administration, the Trump administration, believes that AI will have countless revolutionary applications, economic innovation, job creation, national security, healthcare, free expression, and beyond,” the vice president explained. “And to restrict its development now would not only unfairly benefit incumbents in this space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies that we’ve seen in generations.”
Vance then provided a synopsis of the Trump administration’s objectives for AI.
“With that in mind, I’d like to make four main points today,” Vance said. “Number one, this administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide, and we’re 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,” Vance said. “We’ll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies, and I’d like to see that deregulatory flavor, making its way in a lot of the conversations this conference.”
“Number three, we feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias, and the American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship,” he added.
“And finally, number four, the Trump administration will maintain a pro-worker growth path for AI to be a job creation point in the United States,” Vance said.
The vice president then commended India’s prime minister for asserting that artificial intelligence would not ultimately replace human beings in the workforce.
“I appreciate Prime Minister Modi’s point,” Vance said. “AI, I really believe, will facilitate and make people more productive. It is 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 miss the point.”
“AI, we believe, is going to make us more productive, more prosperous, and more free,” Vance asserted.
Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron are co-hosts of the AI summit, which “will bring together almost 100 countries and over a thousand private sector and civil society representatives from across the world.” The summit has five main themes: public interest in AI, future of work, innovation and culture, trust in AI, and global AI governance.
The day before the two-summit began, Macron unveiled private sector investments in AI intelligence totaling nearly 109 billion euros. Trump also announced a private-sector investment of at least $500 billion in AI infrastructure from OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle last month.
The gathering of global leaders in Paris included Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing, an indication that China is taking the rise of AI seriously.
The release of the Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek last month surprised the technology industry with its claimed ability to rival Open AI’s ChatGPT at a cheaper cost.
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Trump tasked the vice president with negotiating a deal that would allow the social media platform TikTok to divest from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, by April 5.
Vance has previous experience working with tech leaders in Silicon Valley as a junior venture capitalist before he served as an Ohio senator. Tech investor Peter Thiel poured $15 million into Vance’s Senate run.
