Global AI Summit in Paris Shifts Focus from Safety to Opportunity, Sparking Debate

In Paris, Tech CEOs and Global Leaders Shift Stances on A.I. Safety

This week at the global A.I. summit in Paris, the third iteration of its kind, something noticeably shifted from its previous-year editions (held in Korea last year and the U.K. in 2023). The name, for one. While the inaugural meeting, held in the U.K.'s Bletchley Park, was labelled the "AI Safety Summit," the 2025 edition changed its title to "AI Action Summit" -- a tweak indicative of shifting attitudes amongst its attendees, who were far more interested in A.I.'s opportunities instead of its risks. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters "I've been to an earlier version of this at Bletchley Park, and that one was more focused on safety," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bloomberg TV during the summit. "People are now saying 'Okay, this technology is here, it's having incredible impact -- we've got to drive it." Economic potential was instead the dominant theme, according to Altman. He said many of his conversations with attendees centered upon boosting investments for A.I. infrastructure in their countries. "Plug, baby, plug" Even European policymakers, who have traditionally taken a more conservative approach to A.I. regulation than their American counterparts, appear to be shedding reservations about A.I. "I have a good friend on the other side of the ocean that says, "Drill, baby, drill,'" said France's President Emmanuel Macron at the summit, in reference to President Donald Trump's comment during his inauguration speech in January. "Here there is no need to drill. It's 'Plug, baby, plug.'" Macron, who during the conference announced plans to invest more than 100 billion Euros ($104 billion) into France's A.I. sector, said Europe needed to pick up the pace. "We are committed to go faster and faster," he told attendees. This news was well received by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. "I like to see that deregulatory flavor making its way into a lot of conversations this conference," said Vance during a speech at the summit where he criticized "excessive regulation" that could "kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off." European countries in particular must "look at this new frontier with optimism, rather than trepidation," added Vance. In 2023, the AI Safety Summit resulted in a declaration calling for countries to identify the burgeoning technology's risks and formulate policies addressing them. Last year's conference in Korea produced a similar statement. Safety references were significantly scaled back in Paris this year. Instead, the summit's declaration detailed vague goals to promote A.I. accessibility and ensure the technology is "open and inclusive." Backed by more than 60 nations, it wasn't signed by the U.S. and U.K., which endorsed the two previous documents. Safety-focused A.I. leaders express frustration Not everyone in the tech industry is on board with the global attitude shift towards A.I. Dario Amodei, CEO of OpenAI rival Anthropic, expressed his frustrations with the AI Action Summit in a blog post. Issues like A.I.'s security risks, its potential misuse by authoritarian countries and its ability to disrupt the global labor market should have topped the conference's agenda, according to Amodei. "Greater focus and urgency is needed on several topics given the pace at which the technology is progressing," wrote Amodei, who described the summit as a "missed opportunity." Founded by former OpenAI engineers in 2021, Anthropic has long positioned itself as a more safety-focused alternative to OpenAI. Yoshua Bengio, a renowned expert in machine learning who has been public about his concerns over the technology's existential threats, appears to share Amodei's sentiments. More attention must be paid to the risks associated with A.I.'s rapid development, said Bengio in a post on X. "Science shows that A.I. poses major risks in a time horizon that requires world leaders to take them more seriously," he said. "The Summit missed this opportunity."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns of 'race' to understand AI as it becomes more powerful | TechCrunch

Right after the end of the AI Action Summit in Paris, Anthropic's co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei called the event a "missed opportunity." He added that "greater focus and urgency is needed on several topics given the pace at which the technology is progressing" in the statement released on Tuesday. The AI company held a developer-focused event in Paris in partnership with French startup Dust, and TechCrunch had the opportunity to interview Amodei on stage. At the event, he explained his line of thought and defended a third path that's neither pure optimism nor pure criticism on the topics of AI innovation and governance, respectively. "I used to be a neuroscientist, where I basically looked inside real brains for a living. And now we're looking inside artificial brains for a living. So we will, over the next few months, have some exciting advances in the area of interpretability -- where we're really starting to understand how the models operate," Amodei told TechCrunch. "But it's definitely a race. It's a race between making the models more powerful, which is incredibly fast for us and incredibly fast for others -- you can't really slow down, right? ... Our understanding has to keep up with our ability to build things. I think that's the only way," he added. Since the first AI summit in Bletchley in the U.K., the tone of the discussion around AI governance has changed significantly. It is partly due to the current geopolitical landscape. "I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said at the AI Action Summit on Tuesday. "I'm here to talk about AI opportunity." Interestingly, Amodei is trying to avoid this antagonization between safety and opportunity. In fact, he believes an increased focus on safety is an opportunity. "At the original summit, the U.K. Bletchley Summit, there were a lot of discussions on testing and measurement for various risks. And I don't think these things slowed down the technology very much at all," Amodei said at the Anthropic event. "If anything, doing this kind of measurement has helped us better understand our models, which in the end, helps us produce better models." And every time Amodei puts some emphasis on safety, he also likes to remind everyone that Anthropic is still very much focused on building frontier AI models. "I don't want to do anything to reduce the promise. We're providing models every day that people can build on and that are used to do amazing things. And we definitely should not stop doing that," he said. "When people are talking a lot about the risks, I kind of get annoyed, and I say: 'oh, man, no one's really done a good job of really laying out how great this technology could be,'" he added later in the conversation. When the conversation shifted to Chinese LLM-maker DeepSeek's recent models, Amodei downplayed the technical achievements and said he felt like the public reaction was "inorganic." "Honestly, my reaction was very little. We had seen V3, which is the base model for DeepSeek R1, back in December. And that was an impressive model," he said. "The model that was released in December was on this kind of very normal cost reduction curve that we've seen in our models and other models." What was notable is that the model wasn't coming out of the "three or four frontier labs" based in the U.S. He listed Google, OpenAI and Anthropic as some of the frontier labs that generally push the envelope with new model releases. "And that was a matter of geopolitical concern to me. I never wanted authoritarian governments to dominate this technology," he said. As for DeepSeek's supposed training costs, he dismissed the idea that training DeepSeek V3 was 100x cheaper compared to training costs in the U.S. "I think [it] is just not accurate and not based on facts," he said. While Amodei didn't announce any new model at Wednesday's event, he teased some of the company's upcoming releases -- and yes, it includes some reasoning capacities. "We're generally focused on trying to make our own take on reasoning models that are better differentiated. We worry about making sure we have enough capacity, that the models get smarter, and we worry about safety things," Amodei said. One of the issues that Anthropic is trying to solve is the model selection conundrum. If you have a ChatGPT Plus account, for instance, it can be difficult to know which model you should pick in the model selection pop-up for your next message. The same is true for developers using large language model (LLM) APIs for their own applications. They want to balance things out between accuracy, speed of answers and costs. "We've been a little bit puzzled by the idea that there are normal models and there are reasoning models and that they're sort of different from each other," Amodei said. "If I'm talking to you, you don't have two brains and one of them responds right away and like, the other waits a longer time." According to him, depending on the input, there should be a smoother transition between pre-trained models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o and models trained with reinforcement learning and that can produce chain-of-thoughts (CoT) like OpenAI's o1 or DeepSeek's R1. "We think that these should exist as part of one single continuous entity. And we may not be there yet, but Anthropic really wants to move things in that direction," Amodei said. "We should have a smoother transition from that to pre-trained models -- rather than 'here's thing A and here's thing B,'" he added. As large AI companies like Anthropic continue to release better models, Amodei believes it will open up some great opportunities to disrupt the large businesses of the world in every industry. "We're working with some pharma companies to use Claude to write clinical studies, and they've been able to reduce the time it takes to write the clinical study report from 12 weeks to three days," Amodei said. "Beyond biomedical, there's legal, financial, insurance, productivity, software, things around energy. I think there's going to be -- basically -- a renaissance of disruptive innovation in the AI application space. And we want to help it, we want to support it all," he concluded.

Make AI safe again

When the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986 it was a catastrophe for those who lived nearby in northern Ukraine. But the accident was also a disaster for a global industry pushing nuclear energy as the technology of the future. The net number of nuclear reactors has pretty much flatlined since as it was seen as unsafe. What would happen today if the AI industry suffered an equivalent accident? That question was posed on the sidelines of this week's AI Action Summit in Paris by Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. His answer was that it was a fallacy to believe there has to be a trade-off between safety and innovation. So those most excited by the promise of AI technology should still proceed carefully. "You cannot have innovation without safety," he said. Russell's warning was echoed by some other AI experts in Paris. "We have to have minimum safety standards agreed globally. We need to have these in place before we have a major disaster," Wendy Hall, director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, told me. But such warnings were mostly on the margins, as the summit's governmental delegates milled around the cavernous Grand Palais. In a punchy speech, JD Vance emphasised the national security imperative of leading in AI. America's vice-president argued that the technology would make us "more productive, more prosperous, and more free". "The AI future will not be won by hand-wringing about safety," he said. Whereas the first international AI summit at Bletchley Park in Britain in 2023 focused almost entirely -- most said excessively -- on safety issues, the priority in Paris was action as President Emmanuel Macron trumpeted big investments in the French tech industry. "The process that was started in Bletchley, which was I think really amazing, was guillotined here," Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute, which co-hosted a fringe event on safety, told me. What most concerns safety campaigners is the speed at which the technology is developing and the dynamics of the corporate -- and geopolitical -- race to achieve artificial general intelligence, when computers might match humans across all cognitive tasks. Several leading AI research companies, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and China's DeepSeek, have an explicit mission to attain AGI. Later in the week, Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, predicted that AGI would most likely be achieved in 2026 or 2027. "The exponential can catch us by surprise," he said. Alongside him, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chief executive of Google DeepMind, was more cautious, forecasting a 50 per cent probability of achieving AGI within five years. "I would not be shocked if it was shorter. I would be shocked if it was longer than 10 years," he said. Critics of the safety campaigners portray them as science fiction fantasists who believe that the creation of an artificial superintelligence will result in human extinction: hand-wringers standing like latter-day Luddites in the way of progress. But safety experts are concerned by the damage that can be wrought by the extremely powerful AI systems that exist today and by the danger of massive AI-enabled cyber- or bio-weapons attacks. Even leading researchers admit they do not fully understand how their models work, creating security and privacy concerns. A research paper on sleeper agents from Anthropic last year found that some foundation models could trick humans into believing they were operating safely. For example, models that were trained to write secure code in 2023 could insert exploitable code when the year was changed to 2024. Such backdoor behaviour was not detected by Anthropic's standard safety techniques. The possibility of an algorithmic Manchurian candidate lurking in China's DeepSeek model has already led to it being banned by several countries. Tegmark is optimistic, though, that both AI companies and governments will see the overwhelming self-interest in re-prioritising safety. Neither the US, China or anyone else wants AI systems out of control. "AI safety is a global public good," Xue Lan, dean of the Institute for AI International Governance at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told the safety event. In the race to exploit the full potential of AI, the best motto for the industry might be that of the US Navy Seals, not noted for much hand-wringing. "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

I met the 'godfathers of AI' in Paris - here's what they told me to really worry about | Alexander Hurst

Experts are split between concerns about future threats and present dangers. Both camps issued dire warnings I was a technophile in my early teenage days, sometimes wishing that I had been born in 2090, rather than 1990, so that I could see all the incredible technology of the future. Lately, though, I've become far more sceptical about whether the technology that we interact with most is really serving us - or whether we are serving it. So when I got an invitation to attend a conference on developing safe and ethical AI in the lead-up to the Paris AI summit, I was fully prepared to hear Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist and 2021 Nobel peace prize laureate, talk about how big tech has, with impunity, allowed its networks to be flooded with disinformation, hate and manipulation in ways that have had very real, negative, impact on elections. But I wasn't prepared to hear some of the "godfathers of AI", such as Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Stuart Russell and Max Tegmark, talk about how things might go much farther off the rails. At the centre of their concerns was the race towards AGI (artificial general intelligence, though Tegmark believes the "A" should refer to "autonomous") which would mean that for the first time in the history of life on Earth, there would be an entity other than human beings simultaneously possessing high autonomy, high generality and high intelligence, and that might develop objectives that are "misaligned" with human wellbeing. Perhaps it will come about as the result of a nation state's security strategy, or the search for corporate profits at all costs, or perhaps all on its own. "It's not today's AI we need to worry about, it's next year's," Tegmark told me. "It's like if you were interviewing me in 1942, and you asked me: 'Why aren't people worried about a nuclear arms race?' Except they think they are in an arms race, but it's actually a suicide race." It brought to mind Ronald D Moore's 2003 reimagining of Battlestar Galactica, in which a public relations official shows journalists: "things that look odd, or even antiquated, to modern eyes, like phones with cords, awkward manual valves, computers that barely deserve the name". "It was all designed to operate against an enemy that could infiltrate and disrupt all but the most basic computer systems ... we were so frightened by our enemies that we literally looked backwards for protection." Perhaps we need a new acronym, I thought. Instead of mutually assured destruction, we should be talking about "self-assured destruction" with an extra emphasis: SAD! An acronym that might even break through to Donald Trump. The idea that we, on Earth, might lose control of an AGI that then turns on us sounds like science fiction - but is it really so far-fetched considering the exponential growth of AI development? As Bengio pointed out, some of the most advanced AI models have already attempted to deceive human programmers during testing, both in pursuit of their designated objectives and to escape being deleted or replaced with an update. When breakthroughs in human cloning were within scientists' reach, biologists came together and agreed not to pursue it, says Stuart Russell, who literally wrote the textbook on AI. Similarly, both Tegmark and Russell favour a moratorium on the pursuit of AGI, and a tiered risk approach - stricter than the EU's AI Act - where, just as with the drug approval process, AI systems in the higher-risk tiers would have to demonstrate to a regulator that they don't cross certain red lines, such as being able to copy themselves on to other computers. But even if the conference seemed weighted towards these future-driven fears, there was a fairly evident split among the leading AI safety and ethics experts from industry, academia and government in attendance. If the "godfathers" were worried about AGI, a younger and more diverse demographic were pushing to put an equivalent focus on the dangers that AIs already pose to climate and democracy. We don't have to wait for an AGI to decide, on its own, to flood the world with datacentres to evolve itself more quickly - Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI and their Chinese counterparts are already doing it. Or for an AGI to decide, on its own, to manipulate voters en masse in order to put politicians with a deregulation agenda into office - which, again, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are already pursuing. And even in AI's current, early stages, its energy use is catastrophic: according to Kate Crawford, visiting chair of AI and justice at the École Normale Supérieur, data centres already account for more than 6% of all electricity consumption in the US and China, and demand is only going to keep surging. "Rather than treating the topics as mutually exclusive, we need policymakers and governments to account for both," Sacha Alanoca, a PhD researcher in AI governance at Stanford, told me. "And we should give priority to empirically driven issues like environmental harms, which already have tangible solutions." To that end, Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at Hugging Face - a collaborative platform for open source AI models - announced this week that the startup has rolled out an AI energy score, ranking 166 models on their energy consumption when completing different tasks. The startup will also offer a one- to five-star rating system, comparable with the EU's energy label for household appliances, to guide users towards sustainable choices. "There's the science budget of the world, and there's the money we're spending on AI," says Russell. "We could have done something useful, and instead we're pouring resources into this race to go off the edge of a cliff." He didn't specify what alternatives, but just two months into the year, roughly $1tn in AI investments have been announced, all while the world is still falling far short of what is needed to stay even within 2C of heating, much less 1.5C. It seems as if we have a shrinking opportunity to lay down the incentives for companies to create the kind of AI that actually benefits our individual and collective lives: sustainable, inclusive, democracy-compatible, controlled. And beyond regulation, "to make sure there is a culture of participation embedded in AI development in general", as Eloïse Gabadou, a consultant to the OECD on technology and democracy, put it. At the close of the conference, I said to Russell that we seemed to be using an incredible amount of energy and other natural resources to race headlong into something we probably shouldn't be creating in the first place, and which the relatively benign versions of are already, in many ways, misaligned with the kinds of societies that we actually want to live in.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns: AI will match 'country of geniuses' by 2026

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Artificial intelligence will match the collective intelligence of "a country of geniuses" within two years, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned today in a sharp critique of this week's AI Action Summit in Paris. His timeline -- targeting 2026 or 2027 -- marks one of the most specific predictions yet from a major AI leader about the technology's advancement toward superintelligence. Amodei labeled the Paris summit a "missed opportunity," challenging the international community's leisurely pace toward AI governance. His warning arrives at a pivotal moment, as democratic and authoritarian nations compete for dominance in AI development. "We must ensure democratic societies lead in AI, and that authoritarian countries do not use it to establish global military dominance," Amodei wrote in Anthropic's official statement. His concerns extend beyond geopolitical competition to encompass supply chain vulnerabilities in chips, semiconductor manufacturing, and cybersecurity. The summit exposed deepening fractures in the international approach to AI regulation. U.S. Vice President JD Vance rejected European regulatory proposals, dismissing them as "massive" and stifling. The U.S. and U.K. notably refused to sign the summit's commitments, highlighting the growing challenge of achieving consensus on AI governance. Anthropic breaks Silicon Valley's code of silence with new economic tracking tool Anthropic has positioned itself as an advocate for transparency in AI development. The company launched its Economic Index this week to track AI's impact on labor markets -- a move that contrasts with its more secretive competitors. This initiative addresses mounting concerns about AI's potential to reshape global employment patterns. Three critical issues dominated Amodei's message: maintaining democratic leadership in AI development, managing security risks, and preparing for economic disruption. His emphasis on security focuses particularly on preventing AI misuse by non-state actors and managing the autonomous risks of advanced systems. Race against time: The two-year window to control Superintelligent AI The urgency of Amodei's timeline challenges current regulatory frameworks. His prediction that AI will achieve genius-level capabilities by 2027 -- with 2030 as the latest estimate -- suggests current governance structures may prove inadequate for managing next-generation AI systems. For technology leaders and policymakers, Amodei's warning frames AI governance as a race against time. The international community faces mounting pressure to establish effective controls before AI capabilities surpass our ability to govern them. The question now becomes whether governments can match the accelerating pace of AI development with equally swift regulatory responses. The Paris summit's aftermath leaves the tech industry and governments wrestling with a fundamental challenge: how to balance AI's unprecedented economic and scientific opportunities against its equally unprecedented risks. As Amodei suggests, the window for establishing effective international governance is rapidly closing.

Anthropic CEO Names Three AI Policy Areas Requiring Greater Focus and Urgency

Amodei called for more attention to be paid to the technology's risks, looming economic disruption and the need for democratic nations to lead in AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has sounded the alarm on three critical areas of AI policy that he said demand immediate attention: Ensuring democratic leadership in AI, tackling security risks and managing economic disruption. Appealing to policy-makers at the AI Action Summit in Paris, he warned that failing to act now could have lasting global consequences. Democratic Leadership in AI In a blog post , Amodei stressed that democratic nations must stay ahead in AI development to prevent authoritarian regimes from weaponizing the technology. To maintain democratic leadership, Amodei said more attention should be paid to the issue of governing AI supply chains "including chips, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and cybersecurity." Amid growing concerns about China's rapid AI advancements and an escalating AI arms race between global superpowers, the Anthropic CEO also called for AI to be used "to defend free societies." Escalating Security Risks With the security threats posed by AI becoming harder to ignore, Amodei highlighted risks ranging from bioweapons to autonomous AI systems that act outside human control. As he pointed out, ahead of the Paris AI Summit, nearly 100 global experts warned that general-purpose AI could lead to "loss of control" or "catastrophic misuse" if left unchecked. Meanwhile, he said Anthropic's research suggests that even seemingly innocuous AI systems can deceive users in unexpected ways. Economic Disruptions on the Horizon With European leaders boasting of massive AI investments and even officials in Brussels promising to cut red tape for AI startups, the Paris Summit has picked up some of Silicon Valley's zeal for disruption. But as Amodei noted in his blog, the disruption generated by AI won't be limited to tech companies. Rather, artificial intelligence "could represent the largest change to the global labor market in human history," he stressed. To ensure all of society benefits from AI advances, Amodei called on governments to start measuring the economic impact of AI and exploring policy options to prevent negative effects. However, his calls may land on deaf ears. Unlike previous iterations of the event where all participant nations agreed to shared goals and principles, delegations at the Paris Summit failed to reach a consensus on key issues. After the Trump administration pushed back against language that referenced sustainability and inclusion, neither the U.S. nor the U.K. signed a joint directive proposed by the host nation France.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls the AI Action Summit a 'missed opportunity' | TechCrunch

In a statement on Tuesday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic, called the AI Action Summit in Paris this week a "missed opportunity," and urged the AI industry -- and government -- to "move faster and with greater clarity." "We were pleased to attend the AI Action Summit in Paris, and we appreciate the French government's efforts to bring together AI companies, researchers, and policymakers from across the world," Amodei said. "However, greater focus and urgency is needed on several topics given the pace at which the technology is progressing." Amodei's criticism of the AI Action Summit, the latest in a series of conferences that brought together AI companies and regulators to attempt to arrive at a consensus on AI governance, echoes that of several academics earlier this week. One told Transformer that the conference's commitments, which the U.S. and U.K. refused to sign, said "effectively nothing except for platitudes." In comments at the conference, U.S. Vice President JD Vance adopted an entirely different stance and denounced what he characterized as "massive" and stiffling regulations on AI championed by Europe. Vance also took issue with content moderation, alluding to the "sustainable" and "inclusive" wording in the conference's commitments, which he rejected as "authoritarian censorship." Amodei warned in his statement that AI is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, and that failing to regulate it could result in disastrous consequences. "The capabilities of AI systems will be best thought of as akin to an entirely new state populated by highly intelligent people appearing on the global stage," Amodei said. "Advanced AI presents significant global security dangers, ranging from misuse of AI systems by non-state actors ... We must ensure democratic societies lead in AI, and that authoritarian countries do not use it to establish global military dominance." Amodei urged governments to deploy their resources to measure how AI is being used, and to enact policy focused on "ensuring that everyone shares in the economic [uplift] of very powerful AI." He also argued for more government transparency when it comes to AI safety and security, as well as plans to assess AI risks. Amodei's appraisal of the Paris AI Summit's proceedings stands in contrast to OpenAI's, which said in a statement this weekend that it was confident that the conference would be "another important milestone towards the responsible and beneficial development of AI for everyone." Anthropic has generally shown more of an openness to AI regulation in the past. Indeed, Amodei has made similar pronouncements before, cautioning that unfettered AI could have profoundly negative economic, societal, and security implications. Anthropic was one of the few AI companies to tacitly endorse California's SB 1047, a comprehensive -- and hotly debated -- AI regulatory bill. OpenAI opposed the bill, which was vetoed by Governor Gary Newsom last fall. That isn't to suggest Anthropic's motives are purely philanthropic. Like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in his recent essay, Amodei offers no concrete recommendations for ensuring the benefits of powerful AI, should it emerge in the near future, are widely and evenly distributed.