The Grand Palais in Paris hosted a landmark artificial intelligence summit from February 10 to February 11, drawing over 1,000 participants from more than 100 countries. This attendance figure represents roughly three times the number present at the 2023 Bletchley Park gathering, underscoring how AI policy has evolved from a niche technical discussion into a mainstream geopolitical concern.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi jointly chaired the event, a pairing that signals a broadening of leadership in technology governance. The United Kingdom organized the initial safety-focused summit, followed by South Korea. Now France and India are steering the conversation, which has expanded beyond safety to include investment, workforce effects, and national competitiveness.
The venue itself carried symbolic weight. The Grand Palais, a steel-and-glass structure built for the 1900 World’s Fair, stands as a monument to French industrial ambition.
Macron’s administration has explicitly stated its goal of positioning France as a hub for AI development rather than merely a regulator. Modi’s involvement highlights India’s large pool of AI engineers and its government’s interest in deploying the technology for public services. Their joint leadership indicates that the global AI dialogue is no longer limited to transatlantic partners, with Asian and European voices demanding greater influence.
The summit’s official outcomes have not been disclosed in initial reports. However, the trajectory of these gatherings is clear.
The 2023 Bletchley summit was a reactive response to the sudden public availability of large language models. The 2024 Seoul summit began outlining governance frameworks. The Paris summit, with its expanded participant list, appeared focused on normalization—treating AI as an infrastructure layer akin to electricity or the internet, prompting governments to act accordingly.
Civil society groups, academics, and private sector executives were present, reflecting a shift from early AI governance discussions dominated by a small group of lab CEOs and safety researchers. The inclusion of labor representatives, development economists, and officials from countries without their own AI industries suggests a deliberate effort to move beyond previous criticisms that such summits were rich-country clubs.
Macron and Modi’s joint statement was not made public in the source material. Both leaders face domestic pressures to deliver economic growth and view AI as a tool for that purpose. Neither wants governance rules written exclusively by the United States or China, making the Paris summit an assertion of multipolarity in technology policy. The summit concluded yesterday.
No date has been announced for the next gathering, but the pattern of these events becoming larger and more ambitious annual fixtures is now established. The central question has shifted from “Can we control this?” to “How do we build this, and who gets to decide?”—a significant change in a short period.
