What just happened? A divide emerged between the United States and Europe regarding the regulation of AI at the AI Action summit held in Paris this week. While approximately 60 countries, including China, India, and Germany, signed a declaration to ensure AI is "safe, secure, and trustworthy," the US and the UK notably withheld their support. Vice President JD Vance cautioned against "overly precautionary" regulations on AI, emphasizing the US commitment to maintaining its dominance in the technology. "The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful AI systems are built in the US, with American-designed and manufactured chips," Vance said before the assembled crowd of world leaders and tech executives. "America wants to partner with all of you...but to create that kind of trust, we need international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technology rather than strangle it," he added.The summit declaration calls for "ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all."Although the commitments are non-binding, the US and UK had previously signed similar declarations at earlier AI summits. This shift signals a potentially more competitive approach to AI development under the new US administration. Vance's speech was "a 180-degree turnaround from what we saw with the Biden administration," Keegan McBride, a lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute, told the Financial Times.The UK government released a brief statement saying it had not been able to sign the agreement due to concerns about national security and global governance. "We felt the declaration didn't provide enough practical clarity on global governance, nor sufficiently address harder questions around national security and the challenge AI poses to it," a government spokesperson told the BBC. Meanwhile, Downing Street insists its decision was not based on the US shift. "This is about our own national interest, ensuring the balance between opportunity and security," the spokesperson said.The US stance comes amid increasing competition with China in AI development, including chip manufacturing, foundational models, AI chatbots, and the energy required for supercomputers. The recent emergence of the cut-price AI model from the Chinese research lab DeepSeek, for example, caught Silicon Valley groups off guard. // Related StoriesAs for Europe, it is actively seeking to establish a stronger foothold in the AI industry, aiming to reduce reliance on the US and China. French President Emmanuel Macron hosted the two-day summit, where European leaders and companies unveiled approximately 200 billion euros in planned investments in data centers and computing clusters to support the region's AI endeavors. "We need these rules for AI to move forward," he said.Vance also cautioned countries against entering AI deals with "authoritarian regimes," a veiled reference to China. He warned that "partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure," citing CCTV and 5G as examples of "cheap tech...[was] heavily subsidized and exported by authoritarian regimes."Concerns were also raised by the US that Current AI, a foundation launched by France during the summit, could be used to funnel money to French-speaking countries.Frederike Kaltheuner, senior EU and global governance lead at the AI Now Institute, noted that following the launch of the powerful open models from DeepSeek, Europeans felt they had a chance to compete in AI. McBride said of Vance's speech: "[It] was like, 'Yeah, that's cute. But guess what? You know you're actually not the ones who are making the calls here. It's us."