Vice President J.D. Vance arrived in Paris on Monday for his first official overseas trip since taking office, wading into an intensifying global race over artificial intelligence regulation and development — and he reportedly plans on taking on China.
The 40-year-old vice president joins world leaders and tech executives at a high-stakes summit where he plans to resist European calls for tighter AI oversight. The meeting comes amid an escalating three-way competition between American innovation, European regulation, and Chinese state control of the technology.
“I think there’s a lot that some of the leaders who are present at the AI summit could do to, frankly — bring the Russia-Ukraine conflict to a close, help us diplomatically there,” Vance told Breitbart News before departing with his family for France.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun pushed back against U.S. efforts to restrict Chinese AI applications like DeepSeek.
“We oppose drawing ideological lines and oppose overstretching national security concepts and politicizing economic and trade issues,” Guo said Monday.
France announced plans to counter American dominance with 109 billion Euros in private AI investments.
“This is the first time we’ll have had such a broad international discussion in one place on the future of AI,” said Linda Griffin, Mozilla’s vice president of public policy. “I see it as a norm-setting moment.”
Vance said he looked to push back on European tendencies to restrict free speech at the summit.
“We want people to be able to speak their minds, and we believe that free and open debate is actually a good thing. Unfortunately, a lot of our European friends have gone the wrong direction there,” he said.
The vice president will meet Tuesday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and French President Emmanuel Macron before heading to Munich for a security conference where he is expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.